Real-Time Power Mix

The electricity mix is changing faster than ever as nations embrace solar, wind, geothermal and even nuclear power.

Note: Brazil hasn’t been producing any nuclear power since Oct. 28, 2023, when its only nuclear plant went into maintenance. The plant is expected to come back online in December. For Brazil, “Thermal” refers to power generated by coal, natural gas, oil and/or biomass. For the U.S., data are hourly aggregates. For hydroelectricity, net power output is negative when power consumed by pumped storage exceeds power generated by all types of that group.

Why this number

The journey to zero emissions starts here, within the energy sources used by major nations to provide electricity. The charts above are close-to-real-time views of the power grids in four big countries. Using available data collected by Bloomberg, we can watch the shift to zero-emission power—wind, solar, hydro, geothermal and nuclear—as it happens in the U.S., Germany, Brazil and the U.K.

Inside this metric

It’s usually impossible to see live electricity-source data at a national level. Bloomberg Green selected these four countries as global benchmarks because we could approximate their live energy-data streams. Thirty years ago, more than half of all power generation came from coal and natural gas. Thirty years from now, about the same proportion will come from the sun and wind, according to BloombergNEF projections. In this long arc of change, we can use these four nations as a daily proxy for the worldwide energy transition.

How we know

These real-time charts rely on hourly power-generation information gathered by government agencies such as the Brazilian electric system operator, the U.S. Energy Information Administration and the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity.

What progress looks like

The year 2050 has emerged as an important milestone in global decarbonization. Power demand in developing nations is expected to double by 2050 from today’s levels. Scientists have also set 2050 as the recommended end-date for climate pollution, and nations such as the U.K., Costa Rica and New Zealand have adopted this as an official target for reaching zero emissions. How nations walk this line away from fossil-fuel electricity is one of the major factors determining the extent of climate change.

Below, we’ve collected projections from BloombergNEF for total global power generation by type, along with forecasts for 18 countries.

Methodology

Bloomberg Green is monitoring actual power generation by type of energy source for four nations, based on data published by Brazil’s National Operator of the Electric System, the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (for Germany), the Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service (for the U.K.) and the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

In order to calculate the share of net-power generated by carbon-free energy sources, Bloomberg Green reporters classified the various sources as follows; carbon-free: geothermal, hydroelectricity (including pumped storage and run of rivers), nuclear, solar and wind; not carbon-free: biomass, coal (including lignite), natural gas (including gas turbines), oil and waste. We are not including power generated from sources that the original data publishers are tagging as “other,” as their carbon-free classification cannot be inferred. Also, we excluded electricity imports and exports from our calculations.

Brazil, Germany, and the U.K. publish instant snapshots of their power generation data in megawatts. Bloomberg Green monitors their data in a time interval of one hour. The U.S. publishes aggregated hourly data for the previous day in megawatt-hours.

All data represent actual power generated (as opposed to installed capacity, or power generation forecasts). For pumped storage, the process of producing power typically results in power consumption (negative net power output) rather than generation when demand is low. When the power consumed by pumped storage exceeds the power generated by all forms of hydroelectricity for a country, then the total net hydro output is also negative.

BloombergNEF in its 2019 New Energy Outlook projects national electricity demand and generation to 2050. Country-level demand is forecast from several assumptions, including the relationship between population and GDP, and that between electricity intensity and per-capita GDP. Forecasts also assume that emerging economies generally develop the way mature economies have, and that per-capita GDP becomes less electricity-intensive over time.

By: Eric Roston, Mira Rojanasakul, Paul Murray, Brittany Harris, Demetrios Pogkas and Andre Tartar

Edited by: Aaron Rutkoff

With assistance from: Yue Qiu, Dean Halford, Julian Burgess and Lynn Doan