Number of Coal Power Plants by Country 2024

During the past few decades, there has been a major push to move away from coal power. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of countries that have a large number of coal power plants. The country with the most coal power plants, by far, is mainland China. Mainland China is estimated to have more than 1,100 coal power plants still active. Even though China does not share a lot of information with the outside world, satellite images have been used to support this conjecture. China has received a significant amount of pressure from the international community during the past five years to try to reduce the number of coal power plants in its country.

What Countries Have More Than 100 Coal Power Plants?

Even though China has the overwhelming majority of coal power plants in the world, there are several other countries that still have more than 100 coal power plants. India has the second most coal power plants in the world, with approximately 285 coal power plants still active. In addition, the United States has 240 coal power plants still active. The United States has worked hard to try to move away from coal power, but there are still some parts of the country that do not have access to another reliable source of energy. The number of coal power plants in the United States has been steadily dropping during the past few years.

Why Have Countries Moved Away From Coal Power?

There are a few reasons why countries have decided to move away from coal power. The biggest reason is that it is an incredibly filthy source of energy. Today, there is a lot of attention paid to the environment, and those people understand that we need to move away from coal power to protect the world. Furthermore, coal power plants are incredibly expensive to maintain. Many of them are very old, and it is difficult to find parts to replace them when they break. For all of these reasons, countries are trying to move away from coal as a source of power.

What Will Replace Coal Power Plants?

There are a number of sustainable energy sources that could be used to replace coal power plants when they are finally gone. For example, a lot of countries have turned to nuclear power as a way to replace coal power. Even though there is some hesitancy to rely on nuclear power totally, it could prove a viable replacement.

Wind power has also been proposed as a possibility. The wind patterns across the world are very predictable, and there are a lot of countries that have decided to produce windmills as a way to generate power.

Finally, solar power has also become a very popular sustainable form of energy. A lot of countries have been trying to deploy more solar power plants as a way to replace coal power plants. It will be interesting to see just how far these power plants go.