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Comment by gpvos | Hacker News Reader

This map of the European power system is linked from The Featured Article: https://www.entsoe.eu/Documents/Publications/maps/2017/Map_C... [complex pdf, doesn't render well in some viewers].

Several fascinating points:

- Denmark is split between the Nordic (Sjaelland and Lolland) and continental systems. Anyone know why?

- Even North Africa is synced to Europe.

- A corner of northeast Poland is fed by Belarus.

- Cyprus is disconnected, and northern Cyprus apparently has no network to speak of.

- You can see the DC links to the other systems, and e.g. a back-to-back converter at Alytus, Lithuania, that isolates the European from the ex-Soviet system. But I see no such arrangements at the Belarusian and Ukrainian borders, or at the borders with Syria and Iraq. Is this just missing information, or are these countries also synced in some way?

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I worked on software for the Danish energy grid 10 years ago, so my information may be a little outdated. There is actually a connection now, or at least it's planned, but the grid was split simply due to historical reasons.

The Jylland-Fyn grid and Sjælland grid was developed in parallel so we ended up with a grid containing 400kV and 50kV cables West of Store Bælt and 60kV East of Store Bælt.

Your comment prompted me to do some research on that line to Poland.

According to sources I've found (all in Polish, so I'm not linking them here), this 220kV line Between Bialostok and Rossj was built in 1962 and is out of use since 2004. The power to the region is delivered by 100kV lines which are not shows on this map. There was an idea to build a new one double 400kV line to import energy from Belarus but nothing going on so far.

Nice map. Now I understand why TeNNeT (the Dutch semi-state run power transmission/line operator) owns part of and is investing in north Germany since the wind fields basically run directly into the Dutch power grid.

North Cyprus does not surprise me but Crete apparently has no power distribution to speak of or only 50kV lines for transmission.

There's a big ugly gas power station on the north coast of Crete on the edge of Heraklion. I stayed in the hotel next door :-/. There's quite a lot of solar on hotel and house roofs too.

From memory they were planning to have a subsea interconnect installed.

The Great Belt Power Link (DC) in Denmark wasn't built until 2009/2010 to simply reduce price variability between east and west. Sjælland is close to Sweden and the rest of Denmark is easily connected to Germany, so early interlinks made the split naturally.

For some reason I'm having trouble opening the PDF, both in Firefox and with evince on Linux.

This is really heavy pdf. Try llpp or mupdf.

mupdf worked like a charm! Any idea what makes it so performant (or evince so little)?

mupdf is, in my experience, much faster than poppler for complex documents, but mupdf-based viewers generally offer less features than those employing poppler's services (like Okular). These two things might be related.

Weirdly, it opens fine (but slowly) in iOS Safari...

I could only open it with Gimp (which rasters it to a bitmap) on Ubuntu with the installed default software.

Okular will do it, just takes a minute to do so. There are a huge number of layers to the PDF so it's rendering a lot of detail.

This one [1] was linked on another blog in Germany on a discussion of the same topic, seems more like a Google Maps type application and is not as heavy to load (also misses some legend, but... well).

[1] https://openinframap.org/#4/47.96/21.01/Power

> A corner of northeast Poland is fed by Belarus.

You mean Kaliningrad? Because that is not Poland but a Russian exclave

Kaliningrad oblast is clearly labelled "Russia" on the map so it seems unlikely that anybody would make the mistake you're implying.

Looking at the map it's clear that OP means Białystok.

Actaully, after having read the legend at the left of the image, it is clear that many lower-power lines are left out, so it is possible, even likely, that Białystok has a connection to the rest of the country.

Ukraine and Moldova are in process of joining ENTSO-E.

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