About wattwatch

wattwatch shows where US electricity comes from — both the live fuel mix of the grid and the location of the power plants that make it. Everything here is built on free, public-domain US government open data.

Sources

• Fuel mix: EIA Hourly Electric Grid Monitor (Form EIA-930), via the EIA Open Data API v2 — hourly net generation by fuel type for the balancing authorities of the Lower 48.
• Plant map (US, live): EIA inventory of operating generators (Form EIA-860), via the same API — per-plant location, fuel, and capacity.
• Plant map (World): Global Energy Monitor — Global Integrated Power Tracker (March 2026 release, CC BY 4.0) — ~109,000 operating power plants across 217 countries, aggregated from unit-level records.
• History (US): EIA Electric Power Operations (Form EIA-923), via the same API — monthly + annual US net generation and fuel consumption by source back to 2001. wattwatch keeps its own copy so the trends are there on day one, and also logs every live hourly fuel-mix reading it takes to build its own high-resolution record.
• History (World + countries): Ember (ember-energy.org) — yearly electricity generation by source for ~200 countries and a World aggregate, back to 2000. Licensed CC BY 4.0.

Honest about freshness

Net generation by fuel updates hourly with a short lag; the generator inventory is monthly. wattwatch always shows the data hour it's displaying — no fake real-time.

Licensing

EIA data is US-government public domain; the Global Energy Monitor tracker is CC BY 4.0 (attribution required). wattwatch deliberately avoids sources that can't be redistributed freely (PJM Data Miner, IEA Electricity Information).

Not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, WRI, or Global Energy Monitor.