The heat-recovery fleet that AI load will lean on is past twenty
Combined-cycle efficiency comes from the heat-recovery steam generator behind the gas turbine. Counting that fleet by age shows where the maintenance burden already sits.
Key figures
2,783 stations are recorded with heat-recovery steam generators, 2,100.6 GW of capacity.
Of the 2,286 that carry a commissioning year (1,600.5 GW), 840.5 GW has been running 20 years or more, which is 52.5%.
The United States holds 376.1 GW of it, China 197.5 GW.
Why the heat-recovery side matters
A combined-cycle station earns its efficiency twice. The gas turbine produces power, and the heat-recovery steam generator behind it takes the exhaust and raises steam for a second turbine. The hot side of that second circuit — drums, headers, valves, flanges and the pipework between them — is where a plant loses heat when its insulation is tired or has been left off after maintenance.
PowerAtlas records 2,783 stations with heat-recovery steam generators, 2,100.6 GW in total. That is the fleet whose hot surfaces have to be maintained for the next decade.
The fleet by age
| Age in years | Stations | Capacity (GW) |
|---|---|---|
| Under 10 | 463 | 386.8 |
| 10 to 19 | 576 | 373.3 |
| 20 to 29 | 686 | 417.4 |
| 30 to 39 | 289 | 172.8 |
| 40 or more | 272 | 250.3 |
Taking the bands from 20 years upward gives 840.5 GW, or 52.5% of the dated heat-recovery fleet. More than half of this capacity has been through at least two decades of thermal cycling, and cycling is what loosens and degrades insulation on valves, flanges and access points.
Where it sits
| Country | Heat-recovery capacity (GW) |
|---|---|
| United States of America | 376.1 |
| China | 197.5 |
| Japan | 73.6 |
| Russia | 73.0 |
| Italy | 51.2 |
| Saudi Arabia | 50.9 |
| South Korea | 48.9 |
| Iran | 45.7 |
Limits of this count
The heat-recovery flag records that a station has this kind of plant. It does not record how many units, what pressure levels they run, or the condition of anything. Capacity is the station total, not the steam side alone.
What the count does establish is scale and age: 2,286 dated stations, 1,600.5 GW, with over half past twenty years. Any argument that AI load will be met by running the existing combined-cycle fleet harder is an argument about plant of that age.
Sources and method
- Heat-recovery flags, commissioning years and capacity counted from PowerAtlas on 2026-09-25.
- Stations with a commissioning year after 2026, and stations with no year, are excluded from the age bands.
- Capacity shown is total station capacity for stations carrying the heat-recovery flag.
- Global Power Plant Database, World Resources Institute, the largest single upstream source for the station records used here.
- Global Oil and Gas Plant Tracker and the coal and nuclear trackers, Global Energy Monitor, which supply several thousand further station records and much of the status and commissioning data.
- Capacity values are reconciled across the source records, Wikidata nameplate capacity and, for Brazil, the ANEEL SIGA official registry.