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Impacts of Energy Production

Impact metric
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Impacts of Energy Production

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What you should know about this indicator

The data shows the global average values for a given impact for each source. Note, however, this can vary significantly depending on the specific context.

Greenhouse gas emissions per unit of electricity
Lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions per unit of electricity, including emissions from the burning of fuels, mining of materials and production of energy technologies.
Source
UNECE (2021) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 4, 2026
Date range
2021–2021
Unit
kilograms of CO₂-equivalents per megawatt-hour

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

UNECE – Integrated Life-cycle Assessment of Electricity Sources

This dataset is based on the large meta-analysis of the impacts of electricity production carried out by the UNECE's Lifecycle Assessment of Electricity Generation Options assessment. This is based on literature review of life-cycle assessments of electricity sources: these not only include the direct impacts of an electricity source (for example, the land used for individual power plants) but also include any supply chain inputs (for example, land use upstream in supply chains, such as mining for fuel or raw materials. This meta-analysis included measurements across all regions; here we present the global average across these values. Note that for some impacts - land use, for example - there can be significant differences in the maximum and minimum values for a given source depending on context, such as the climate of a given location; choices around spacing and density of electricity sources etc.

The content of the report was updated with a corrigendum.

Retrieved on
May 4, 2026
Retrieved from
https://unece.org/sed/documents/2021/10/reports/life-cycle-assessment-electricity-generation-options
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNECE – Integrated Life-cycle Assessment of Electricity Sources (2022). United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.

This dataset is based on the large meta-analysis of the impacts of electricity production carried out by the UNECE's Lifecycle Assessment of Electricity Generation Options assessment. This is based on literature review of life-cycle assessments of electricity sources: these not only include the direct impacts of an electricity source (for example, the land used for individual power plants) but also include any supply chain inputs (for example, land use upstream in supply chains, such as mining for fuel or raw materials. This meta-analysis included measurements across all regions; here we present the global average across these values. Note that for some impacts - land use, for example - there can be significant differences in the maximum and minimum values for a given source depending on context, such as the climate of a given location; choices around spacing and density of electricity sources etc.

The content of the report was updated with a corrigendum.

Retrieved on
May 4, 2026
Retrieved from
https://unece.org/sed/documents/2021/10/reports/life-cycle-assessment-electricity-generation-options
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNECE – Integrated Life-cycle Assessment of Electricity Sources (2022). United Nations Economic Commission for Europe.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Greenhouse gas emissions per unit of electricity”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2023) - “Energy”. Data adapted from UNECE. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261111-003552/grapher/impacts-of-energy-sources.html [online resource] (archived on November 11, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

UNECE (2021) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

UNECE (2021) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Greenhouse gas emissions per unit of electricity” [dataset]. UNECE, “Integrated Life-cycle Assessment of Electricity Sources” [original data]. Retrieved November 11, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261111-003552/grapher/impacts-of-energy-sources.html (archived on November 11, 2026).

Download

Quick download

Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/impacts-of-energy-sources.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&impact_metric=water_use&sub_metric=na
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/impacts-of-energy-sources.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&impact_metric=water_use&sub_metric=na

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/impacts-of-energy-sources.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&impact_metric=water_use&sub_metric=na")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/impacts-of-energy-sources.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&impact_metric=water_use&sub_metric=na", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/impacts-of-energy-sources.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&impact_metric=water_use&sub_metric=na").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/impacts-of-energy-sources.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&impact_metric=water_use&sub_metric=na")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/impacts-of-energy-sources.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&impact_metric=water_use&sub_metric=na")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/impacts-of-energy-sources.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false&impact_metric=water_use&sub_metric=na", encoding("utf-8") clear