This is the accompanying repository for the Bloomberg Global Coal Countdown (BGCC) website.

• Data Sources
• Dashboard Data
• Schema and Validation
• License

Data Sources

The data presented on the BGCC website comes from the following sources:

1. Global Energy Monitor's (GEM) Global Coal Plant Tracker (GCPT) and the accompanying GCPT status changes since 2015. GEM's GCPT dataset provides unit-level data and it is the basis for all calculations related to coal-plant capacity, status, technology and age.
2. Country-level coal phaseout strategies, country-level expected retirements and global emission pathways from University of Maryland's (UMD) Center for Global Sustainability (CGS). Datasets from UMD are outputs from published research, and are therefore mostly served as is with very few modifications for aesthetic purposes such as smooth interpolation.
3. Ember's Global Electricity Review 2023 data. Ember's dataset provides panel data over three dimensions, namely area (such as country and regions), year and variable (such as energy sources). It is used as the basis for all calculations related to energy mixes and trends.
4. In the Headlines content is scraped from CoalWire published by GEM. A CoalWire issue consists of multiple articles, news and analysis pieces, which are individually presented on the BGCC site.
5. Research and analysis pieces as curated by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
6. Gapminder data, HYDE, and UN Population Division (2023) estimates as presented by Our World in Data's (OWD) world population data since 1800.
7. Natural Earth Data's country vectors as presented by Graydon Hoare with our own manual modifications for aesthetic reasons in order to make the interactive map appear more presentable.
8. Country commitments to phasing out coal as well as no new coal are based on research from UMD CGS and the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA).
9. Expected retirements by 2030 of each country are collected and maintained by PPCA.

The countries’ political affiliations such as EU27+1, G20, G7, OECD and PPCA are taken as of July 2021. We have decided to include the United Kingdom into the EU27+1 list in order to maintain comparability with other EU figures that have been reported in the past.

Dashboard Data

The resulting datasets are available for download as part of a release attached to the repository - see Releases.

The following JSONs correspond to a page on the BGCC website:

• coal_capacity_landscape.json
• coal_power_generation.json
• country_main.json
• homepage.json
• newsfeed.json

The following JSONs are utility lookup datasets:

• country_coal_status.json
• country_iso_lookup.json
• iso_country_lookup.json
• website_texts.json

The mapbox.json data is uploaded one feature at a time to Mapbox using the Mapbox API. The country_bounding_boxes.json is used to center the map view on the selected country.

Schema and Validation

Each JSON file is accompanied by a Pydantic model, which is used as a schema documentation and runtime validation. The Pydantic models can be found in schema/models.py. The source code references two other files, namely schema/validators.py and schema/enum.py, which contain custom validators and valid country names and the corresponding ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes.

In the docker directory, we make available a Dockerfile and a requirements.txt to build an ephemeral Docker container, which we used to generate the data at the time writing.

License

As the datasets are built upon the GEM's GCPT dataset, the BGCC datasets are also licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Therefore, it is allowed to copy and redistribute, as well as to build upon the datasets for any purpose including for commercial purposes. If you do build upon the datasets, you must distribute it under the same license.