Bangladesh is among the top 20 countries which have prospective solar farm capacities but nowhere in the list of top 20 wind power capacity nations, as per the recently published data by Global Energy Monitor (GEM).
GEM launched this new tracker on Tuesday, showing the country-by-country build-out of utility-scale solar and wind.
GEM released two new tools for tracking the global transition to renewable energy: a wind power tracker covering wind farm phases of 10 megawatts (MW) or more, and a solar power tracker covering utility-scale solar PV farm phases of 20 MW or more (10 MW or more in Arabic-speaking countries).
Combining government, corporate, and other public data, the two trackers provide project-level data to show the speed and extent to which countries are building out wind and solar power.
As per the tracker, Bangladesh has around 2,665 prospective solar farm capacities while merely 355 prospective wind farm capacities for development. Currently, Bangladesh has 34 solar farm phase counts with only 7 wind farm phase counts.
A solar project phase is generally defined as a group of one or more solar units that are installed under one permit, and one power purchase agreement, and typically come online at the same time.
The recently released Global Solar Power Tracker catalogs every solar farm phase at these capacity thresholds of any status, including operating, announced, under development, under construction, shelved, canceled, mothballed, or retired.
The Global Wind Power Tracker (GWPT) catalogs 13,263 operating utility-scale wind farm phases generating 681.4 GW in 144 countries, and an additional that would generate 882.0 GW. Countries with the most operating utility-scale wind project capacity are China (261.2 GW), United States (127.3 GW), Germany (39.6 GW), Spain (26.8 GW), and India (23.7 GW).
The Global Solar Power Tracker (GSPT) catalogs 5,190 operating utility-scale solar farm phases generating 289.7 gigawatts (GW) in 148 countries, and an additional 3,551 prospective projects that would generate 651.6 GW.
Utility-scale solar accounts for roughly 65 per cent of total global solar capacity with the remaining 35 per cent being residential and commercial installations. Countries with the most operating utility-scale solar project capacity are China (130.3 GW), United States (43.4 GW), India (29.0 GW), Vietnam (11.3 GW), and Mexico (10.5 GW).
“Capturing the full extent of utility solar and wind built-out around the world is critical for measuring progress towards the energy transition,” said Ingrid Behrsin, project manager for GEM’s Global Wind Power Tracker.
“With open-access project-level data like these, we are now in a much stronger position to track how countries are stacking up against their own stated renewables goals,” the project manager added.
