A century-scale dataset of hydropower stations in mainland China (1909–2025)
Description
The hydropower station dataset comprises three components: international data, national data, and supplementary data. The international data are primarily sourced from global hydropower databases such as GEM, GloHydroRes, and GPPD; the national data are collected from official statistics, bulletins, and policy records released by the Ministry of Water Resources and the National Energy Administration; and the supplementary data are compiled from archival investigations, project reports, and peer-reviewed literature, ensuring coverage of small and early hydropower stations. The dataset includes 2,918 hydropower stations across 31 provinces and 11 major river basins in China, covering the period of over 100 years . Since the 2010s, we have systematically integrated multi-source records and standardized attributes such as location, installed capacity, commissioning year, operational status, and reservoir characteristics, which form the core structure of this dataset.
Files
Steps to reproduce
Hydropower station records were collected from multiple sources, including international databases (e.g., GEM, GloHydroRes, GPPD), official Chinese statistics and yearbooks, policy documents, and archival records. All data entries were cross-checked, and missing information for early or small stations was supplemented by project reports and historical archives.During integration, attribute fields such as name, location, commissioning year, installed capacity, operational status, and reservoir characteristics were standardized. Units were unified (e.g., kW converted to MW), geographic coordinates were transformed into decimal degrees under a unified CRS, and duplicate entries were removed using reverse geocoding and manual verification.Quality control involved consistency checks across multiple sources, with completeness exceeding 95%.
Institutions
- Northwest Normal UniversityGansu, Lanzhou