Power Plants of North America

The North American Power Plants interactive map shows the location of nearly 10,000 power plants in the USA, Canada & Mexico. The map also provides a breakdown of how much capacity is provided by each type of power plant. Currently natural gas provides over 40% of capacity in the whole of North America.

6,400 of the power plants on the map (generating one or more megawatts) use renewable sources, such as hydroelectric, wind, solar, pumped storage, biomass, geothermal and tidal. 3,300 of the power plants use non-renewable sources (natural gas, coal, nuclear and petroleum).

You can use the drop-down menu to filter the map by type of of power production. When you filter the map then the map sidebar also updates to provide a breakdown of the capacity within the selected sector. This sidebar also automatically updates as you zoom & pan the map to provide a breakdown of capacity for only the power plants shown in the current map view.


Carbon Brief also provides a comprehensive map showing How the US generates electricity. The map visualizes how & where electricity is generated in the USA and the amount of electricity generated by the different types of electricity production.

The map allows you to filter the results by type of electricity production. This allows you to see where in the country the different types of electricity production create the most output. For example geothermal power plants are all based in the west of the country while nuclear power plants seem to be mostly built in the east.

All the power plants are displayed on the map using colored scaled markers. The colors indicate the type of power plant and the size of the markers represents the plants' output capacity. The graph in the map sidebar shows the percentage that each type of production contributes to the total of electricity production in the United States. You can select a state from the drop-down menu to view the makeup of the capacity mix for that state.