Table 1.
Top 20 countries with the highest hydropower potential per capita.
Fig 1.
Global map of gross hydropower potential distribution.
Fig 2.
Global map of hydropower per capita per country.
The cut-off values correspond to present per capita energy production in China (3300 kWh/year), Europe (6100 kWh/year, and the USA (13,200 kWh/year).
Fig 3.
Global number of gross potential hydropower locations of a certain size.
Total number of locations found is 1.2 × 107. For Micro: N = 8.0 × 106, Mini: N = 2.7 × 106, Small: N = 8.8 × 105, Large: N = 1.6 × 105. The empirical fits allow the computation of the number of locations in a certain range while choosing an arbitrary bin size. The number of potential pico hydropower locations would be larger if computations were performed on a finer-resolution grid. For the separation between the classes, a capacity factor of 0.5 was used.
Table 2.
Hydropower potential per continent and its distribution among large, small, micro and mini plant sizes.
Fig 4.
Global map of gross hydropower potential distribution.
Large (>10MW), small (1–10 MW), mini (0.1–1 MW), micro (0.005–0.1 MW), and pico(<0.005MW) plants.