A dataset of China’s overseas power projects (2000–2019)

Power shortage is one of the serious problems faced by developing countries along the Belt and Road. Since the Belt and Road initiative was put forward, China’s companies have invested and built a large number of electrical power projects in countries and areas with power shortages in this region. Due to the large number and wide distribution of projects as well as the growing number of new power projects, there is a large amount of project information to be collected here and there not conducive to information mining. Therefore, it is urgent to summarize the information on China’s overseas power projects along the Belt and Road. With the aid of web crawler technology, we obtain China’s overseas power project information, which was further supplemented and improved by referring to the documents from ministries, embassies, counselors of the Ministry of Economy and Commerce, local news reports in Chinese and English, case studies and field studies conducted by scholars and non-governmental organizations. The dataset contains information on 383 power projects from 76 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, America, and Oceania. Each project’s information includes the project number, project name, construction status, enterprise name, secondary units, installed capacity, based continent and country, project category, and bid-winning information. The collection and improvement of this dataset can reflect the distribution regularities of China’s overseas power projects, as well as the development trend in overseas power investment and construction in recent years. Based on this dataset, China’s power companies can acquire useful information to better go global. It can provide a reference for the development planning of overseas power projects and the decision-making practice of government sectors.