Methodology

World Power Monitor is built on two layers of data that are never blended into one number.

• Compiled statistics. Every country page is built from Ember, an energy think tank that compiles electricity generation, demand, imports, emissions and capacity from national statistics offices, energy ministries and grid operators. These figures are annual, and monthly for 88 countries. They run weeks to months behind the present and are revised when national agencies publish final numbers.
• Live operator data. Grid operators such as the US balancing authorities publish hourly demand and generation. These readings are metered and provisional. They will appear on separate live grid pages, each with its own source line and timestamp.

The two layers disagree by a few percent even when they describe the same country and year, because they measure different things (see below). Rather than choose one or average them, each page section shows one source, names it, and states the period it covers. A figure labelled "right now" or "latest hour" only ever comes from an operator feed; Ember figures always carry their year or month.

Country and world figures come from Ember's data API, which is updated more often than Ember's downloadable files. Two datasets the API does not provide, installed capacity by fuel and electricity demand per person, come from Ember's yearly data file. For 6 small territories that the API does not cover, every figure comes from that file, and their pages say so.

• Coverage. 215 countries and territories. Ember's history starts in 1985 for 22 countries and in 1990 for 30 more; most other series start in 2000. History pages show whatever depth exists and say where it starts.
• Latest year. Countries publish on different schedules. 93 countries have figures for 2025; the rest end a year or more earlier. Rankings compare countries within the same year only, and say how many countries had data for that year.
• Refresh. The pipeline checks Ember every day for the current and previous year and reloads the full history every week, so revisions to older years are picked up.
• Revisions. When Ember revises a figure, the new value replaces the old one on the site, and the previous value is kept in our database with a revision number. Nothing is overwritten without a record.

Every source's categories are mapped to one list: coal, gas, oil, other fossil, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, bioenergy, geothermal, other renewables, storage and other. Imports are a flow, not a fuel. If a source introduces a category that is not mapped, the data load stops rather than guessing.

• Other fossil is Ember's category for fossil fuels other than coal and gas. It is mostly oil products, which is why it is not labelled oil.
• Other renewables covers geothermal, tidal and wave power where Ember reports them together.
• Low carbon means nuclear plus all renewables.
• Shares are percentages of total generation, as published by Ember, so they can add up to slightly more or less than 100% after rounding.
• Negative values. Occasionally a fuel's net generation is slightly negative, when its plants used more electricity than they produced in a year. These values are shown with their sign and never counted as a fuel's share or as the largest source.

• Gross or net. Some statistics count what generators produce before their own consumption; operator data usually reports what reaches the grid.
• Coverage. Factories that generate their own power, rooftop solar and small off-grid systems are included in some datasets and missing from others.
• Timing. Operator data is provisional and revised within days or weeks; national statistics are revised a year or more later.
• Carbon intensity. Ember's intensity figures count emissions per kilowatt hour generated using Ember's own emission factors. Other publishers use different factors or count only direct emissions, so their figures differ.

• Energy is shown in TWh (terawatt hours, one billion kWh), or GWh for small systems. Power is in MW, capacity in GW, and carbon intensity in grams of CO2 per kWh.
• Dates are written in full, for example 2026-09-19 (19 September 2026).
• Hourly data is stored in UTC and shown in each grid's local time with the UTC offset, so changes to and from daylight saving time are never ambiguous.
• Prices, when shown, are in the market's own currency first, with any conversion to US dollars shown separately with its exchange rate and date.