California Power Plants (2022)

The power plant locations and characteristics are part of the California Energy Commission’s (CEC) critical infrastructure geospatial data sets. The data is derived from the CEC’s QFER-1304 Power Plant Owner Reporting Database and is updated annually. Among other information, a number of identifying attributes are given for each power plant as well as the generator units at each plant, their energy type, the total nameplate capacity, and their owners and operators.

This California Power Plants data set has identical information to the many tables making up the QFER data set, however this single feature layer is derived by condensing several QFER tables into one. Some fields of the original tables have been omitted, and point geometries, determined by each plants’ address fields, have been appended for geospatial display. Four new fields have been compiled from QFER’s Annual Generation Table. These are listed and defined as:

• Nameplate Capacity (MW): The total nameplate capacity from every unit that makes up the power plant, regardless of status
• Units: List of the unit names at each power plant
• Primary Energy Source: A list of the primary energy sources used by every generator at the plant
• Last Reported Year: The last year that the power plant was recorded in the Annual Generation Table.

This dataset was obtained from the California Energy Commission.

Post processing by Conservation Biology Institute.