Heat Rates

Column Key for Heat Rates:

"Heat Rate" is a broad measure of thermal efficiency of a power plant in the conversion of fuel into electricity. It measures the amount of heat input in Btus per hour for each kilowatt-hour of electricity produced. For this table, the heat rate is expressed in MMBtu per MWh.

Category: Broad classifications for power plants:

• G = Natural Gas
• S = Solar
• T = Geothermal
• N = Nuclear
• C = Coal
• E = Biomass
• H = Hydro
• X = Wind

Year (second column): Use the small "^" and the "v" beside the current year showing to view other years. For most datasets, the oldest year will be 2001.

Company Name: The last recorded company name that owns the power plant.

Plant ID: The CEC Plant ID is a unique identifier used by the Cartography Unit to track power plants.

Plant Name: The name given for the plant by the company owner. May be different from other common references in use in other proceedings, hearings, etc.

Net MWh: Total energy produced by the plant for the given year in megawatt-hours.

Main MMBtu: Total primary fuel consumed by the plant in a year as measured in MMBtu.

Heat Rate: The heat rate as expressed in MMBtu/MWh. A more common reference for heat rates is typically Btu/kWh: simply multiply the given heat rate by 1,000 to convert from MMBtu/MWh to Btu/kWh.

NOTE: The information in the following table can be copied to a spreadsheet program such as MS Excel by highlighting the desired records and then copying and pasting them into a spreadsheet. A single spreadsheet download option is not provide since there are multiple years of data available. The source "txt" files are available for download and can be used in a spreadsheet program such as MS Excel or imported into a database application such as MS Access.