alt Hacker NewsOpen Infrastructure Map
Comments
It may be my autism, but as a kid, I was always fascinated by infrastructure, particularly power lines. My dad once drove me down an Edison Road up to the top of a mountain just to see where the power line went. We had to stop at the top. I could see my neighborhood from a view that I had never seen before. Today I would consider it beautiful. Back then it was weird!
I had a fascination with how different the poles looked and how the equipment was mounted. It seemed like no two pylons were alike.
Based on this map, it looks like all of our power comes from hydroelectric.
I love this site. I just wish it was more complete. There are some major water and natural gas pipelines that aren't recorded. Maybe in time.
When I lived in Texas, we had a massive storm in winter of 2021 leaving many without power for a week.
I was told that Texas maintained its own energy grid independent from the rest of the nation’s eastern and western grids, and supposedly only had a handful of high-voltage DC lines running between Texas’s and the rest of the nation’s. Supposedly this was why we couldn’t rely on excess capacity from anywhere else in the nation while our power generation capability was down.
But this map doesn’t seem to show Texas as isolated - there appear to be many lines in and out and no clear separation?
Shout out to the UK for the number of off-shore wind turbine farms:
I find the fact that beer pipelines have their own color designation in the map legend intriguing. Are they common enough outside of breweries to merit singling them out?
One can nicely see the bridge across the river that was burned in the recent attack in Berlin. https://openinframap.org/#15.16/52.425587/13.307235
Everything on the left thereof was then without power for multiple days as this was a single point of failure.
See thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46487404
Also interesing one can find places like https://openinframap.org/#18.27/49.995951/18.966733 where 220kV line is just above a house.
I wonder how easy it would be to prepare a query in osm to find all such cases.
Gigachad french nuclear versus virgin german coal in map form.
The map for Australia is interesting. Is this missing data? See no infrastructure for Alice Springs in the interior of Australia.
For the Netherlands (and surrounding countries), there is Hoogspanningsnet (the high-voltage grid), which is maintained by infrastructure enthusiasts: https://webkaart.hoogspanningsnet.com/
An initially-stupid-sounding idea I heard a while back was running power cables through the ocean floors between America and the rest of the world. It's apparently feasible and the big benefit of it is that at the grid peak hour when the sun is not shining in Europe, they can get cheap solar from America and vice versa
It lists 'Centrale Hemweg' (Amsterdam). This plant was decommissioned 6 years ago. How up to date is this data?
In New Zealand at least, a lot of this data seems to come from imagery; it's quite outdated, the cables are all missing and the voltages are pretty hit and miss. Cool project though.
This is really cool. I had no idea my city had two underground 50kV cables to distribute the power.
From what I can see it's pretty complete and up to date for my area.
It is a great tool for terrorist attacks: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgrpzn6gz4o
Some previous discussion:
It seems to me that past civilisations on earth were more evolved given their railway infrastructure. Incredible.
Telecom just seems to show data centers? Was hoping to see where cable/fiber lines.
Excellent link, thank you for posting!
Wanted to do a map of the power network here in Romania, hadn't thought to check if anything similar already existed, or I couldn't find it myself, at least, but it seems like this map has (almost) all that I wanted to do in that respect, including the position of the power poles on the ground.
I find this site so fascinating, seeing how all the massive power lines are hooked up to far-away power plants and gradually have their voltage stepped down as they connect to consumers. All the undersea cables and pipelines I didn't know about.