Open Infrastructure Map | Hacker News Reader

Open Infrastructure Map

openinframap.org

465 pointsefskap93 comments

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.

It’s really interesting how perception of openness changes over time. During cold war publishing this information would send one directly to gulag.

Yeah, and it feels like we’re sliding back the same way.

With the recent blackout in Berlin, I've heard requests to hide these information.

Because obscurity works against insider threats and OSint /s

It’s a double edged sword - secrecy leads to accidental damage by fishermen & anchors, so generally you want your cables and pipes charted.

There are cables not on this map that are uncharted for things like acoustic monitoring & finger printing of vessels.

I have license for boat and use nautical maps. They show me a cable, but not the hierarchy of the infrastructure. I see a cable, but can’t evaluate if half of town stays without electricity or only an island with dozen houses if I damage it.

However the available maps do not stop russian ships regularly dropping anchors on European infrastructure in Baltic see. Obviously charting them does not help. Maybe they should stay secret at the end.

You can hide the position of the cables from fishermen and the public. But if someone knows where they are, it is the KGB, I mean, FSB.

We should make information about infrastructure public. There was a power outtage in Berlin, due to to an attack aginst a 'secret' cable bridge. If the map of cables would have been public, then the public may have had a chance to realize that having no backup cable is a bad idea for critical infrastructure.

There were backup cables. The bridge carried 5 cables, redundancy configuration would have been 3+2 afaik. But only for purposes of maintenance, not to protect against hostile action. For that, one should have taken care to not have all redundancies on the same bridge ;)

And in most environments, you cannot hide the location of those cables. Either they are visible directly, like all overhead power lines. No use in hiding those. And for the underground ones, you could try to hide them. But every backhoe operator will rightfully want a map of those anyways, so the information will come out in some way.

The only environment where hiding this kind of infrastructure would be possible is some state-does-everything soviet-like police state. Where comrade backhoe-operator wouldn't get a map, but he would get accompanied by a secret police supervisor who would tell him where to dig and where not to.

The submission’s map includes the affected area of the power outage, so that info is already public, isn’t it? https://openinframap.org/#12.98/52.43214/13.26948

Would you feel comfortable making a decision on putting an anchor down on a cable if you knew it would only take out a few hundred houses worth of power.

I would imagine that any body that issues you a license should inform you to not anchor in proximity to cables, regardless of size / spec etc. if you put an anchor down on a charted cable, and the cable is where it should be, I think you’d be responsible for the cost of damage.

I anchor very carefully on the rocks or sandy seabed. I don’t anchor in seaweed areas and on pipes or cables. Additional attention from local newspaper is not desired.

So you don’t need to know hierarchy, just avoid cables?

> It’s a double edged sword - secrecy leads to accidental damage by fishermen & anchors, so generally you want your cables and pipes charted.

Yeah, and the other edge of the sword is on display in the Baltic Sea nowadays, where "fishermen" accidentally keep dragging their anchors for miles across the sea bottom, always somehow exactly where the communication cables are.

I saw a nice presentation by Michael Cruickshank with an intelligence background that was using public geospatial data like what this is based on to model how climate change would affect power outages in an African city. In that case he was trying to figure out where all the power infrastructure was that would be affected in a flooding and then model network effects to figure out which parts of the city would end up being affected. Really interesting work.

Michael presented at the Berlin Geomob. His website has a more general overview of what he does: https://www.michaelcruickshank.me/recentwork. That does not seem to include a lot of detail on what he presented. Possibly because he is trying to be responsible here.

The security angle did come during the presentation. This is not the type of information that a lot of governments would want to make public but also something that could help them. You can mine a lot of intelligence from public data. And his approach of doing some kind of scenario modelling on top of the open data actually is interesting. That's something that can be used for good and for evil. And obviously something that a lot of intelligence agencies are probably already doing.

> You can mine a lot of intelligence from public data. And his approach of doing some kind of scenario modelling on top of the open data actually is interesting.

That’s sort of how it happens in the intelligence world. A bunch of analysts can look at open source data - news snippets, public data sets etc, but once they analyze it and distill to some conclusions it may become sensitive or classified.

I know I will never live to see a site like this that documents all of the innards of airports. Airport layouts are my special interest.

In the EU all that data, including high res LiDAR data has to be made publicly available by the responsible authorities. also high res aerial imagery which with the lidar together you can use to build a 3D model of the surface and ground of military buildings/area in blender, because even that in many cases is not excluded or censored. It’s already used for “criminal activities” by metal detectorists and grave robbers a lot haha but it shouldn’t be too hard for foreign intelligence to render some maps for egoshooters from them to train their soldiers for missions in specific locations

Me too. I particularly recommend looking at the wind farms East of the UK and North of the Northern coast of Europe, and their connections back to land by power lines. Not something you think about when you imagine those seas looking at a regular map.

https://openinframap.org/#5.48/54.077/2.676

Amaze!

First thing that caught my eye. Apparently the reason is to make use of stronger, more consistent winds on open sea.

Right? I didn't know there was a 130 MW (diesel) power plant on an island connected and off the coast of Taiwan.

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?

More info on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection

> The Texas Interconnection is maintained as a separate grid for political, rather than technical reasons

Texas is actually on ~4 different grids. I live north of Houston and I'm on MISO.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/ERCOT-geographic-footpri...

That's not what that image means at all. If you look closely, you'll even see 3 additional colors, plus white, from the 4 I'm guessing you identified.

Those are ERCOT load zones, a distinct concept and all within the ERCOT interconnection (grid).

On the markets side, Texas is made up of ERCOT, and then has portions in (descending order) MISO, SPP, and the non-market West.

In terms of "grids" Texas is mostly ERCOT, and then the Eastern Interconnection with a small smidge of Western Interconnection in the far west in El Paso Electric's territory.

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.

Yep and its why some of us look for careers that let us work in rarely seen places, and devices most dont know exist, but are imperative to modern society.

Shout out to the UK for the number of off-shore wind turbine farms:

https://openinframap.org/#7.17/52.529/1.681

Except that the UK has one of the most expensive electricity prices in the world

That has two causes, dependency on natural gas, which would be worse without renewables and taxes, which is unrelated to renewables and related to general policy goals of reducing energy demand.

Also even in a European context UK power prices aren’t as high as many of its peers.

If I'm remembering correctly, it's because the previous government set the price floor to the average natural gas price, artificially propping up their north sea oil & gas industry that's been noncompetitive for decades. Even though they can make cheap energy, consumers get screwed because of national security concerns.

Unfortunately I don't have a source, and would appreciate a UK national with better understanding than me to chime in :)

Pretty much all electricity markets worldwide set the unit price based on the the cost of the "marginal" (most expensive) generator running during each time period. It's a weirdly common misconception that the UK is unique in doing this.

If you paid generators what they bid, then they're incentivised to manipulate their bids to try and make the most money, distorting the market.

Almost all the wind farms and many solar farms in the UK operate under the "contract for difference" system, where they're guaranteed a fixed price per unit and have to pay back any income above that. So a lot of the money paid is clawed back through that method.

The reason the UK's electricity has been expensive over the last few years comes down to:

  - Shutdown of several nuclear plants without any replacement
  - Shutdown of coal plants and replacement with gas
  - The Ukraine war affecting gas prices
  - Clean energy surcharges on bills (which hit electricity bills a lot harder than gas bills, regardless of how clean the electricity is...)

There will be a bunch more renewables coming online soon which will hopefully start crowding out gas and driving the price down more regularly, so hopefully prices will start dropping faster soon.

>Pretty much all electricity markets worldwide set the unit price based on the the cost of the "marginal" (most expensive) generator running during each time period

Indeed. This is inherent failing of the use of auctions for setting price. While using auctions is a laudable goal, in reality it is not very efficient and easily gamed. Having a central purchaser model is not idea from a ideological standpoint but clearly more efficient allowing correctly controlling for more variables than can (crudely) be transmitted through a 30 minute auction period.

Enron made a ton of money gaming energy auctions until it all fell apart.

https://www.marketplace.org/story/2021/09/30/20-years-later-...

The only reason the wind farms got built was because they got guaranteed a high price of electricity that took the risk out of it. This changed more recently which is why building stopped.

Another factor is in the UK everything below the average tide line is owned by the Crown (as in the King not the government) who were very happy to get lease income. The Govt was also happy so it didn't look like the people were funding the King (which they are).

Also the public are very against wind turbines on land which is reasonable in England where there isn't much isolated land to put them.

At least they got built, which is more than can be said for the nuclear plants.

https://www.electricitybills.uk/ shows a breakdown of the components of consumer energy bills. It's not as simple as saying "it's expensive because of gas", though pricing based on the marginal production cost is one component.

Thanks, interesting. The price almost doubled between 2021 and 2022. Has been coming down since.

Related - "The UK is wasting a lot of wind power" from 2023. https://archy.deberker.com/the-uk-is-wasting-a-lot-of-wind-p...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34358795

Germany is even more expensive.

Makes sense. If you're an island surrounded by water, you don't have to go through the hassle of finding a piece of land to put them on.

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

I immediately went and looked for it too!

I also tried to see any vulnerable sabotage spots that would put my electricity out, but that seems harder.

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?

There are two beer pipelines in Belgium: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2isf I think the fact that they're in the OpenStreetMap data at all is enough to give them their own color on the map.

I know there's one in Bruges, which is mapped on here: https://openinframap.org/#13.22/51.21001/3.22418/A,B,I,L

I suspect that it is more about being a cool fact than being common.

Some previous discussion:

2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39109185

2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29948473

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.

Missing data and incomplete layers I'd say.

I know the areas from Alice west to the coast and north to the equator fairly well.

Rail lines are missing, it appears to be just "big" power lines and that's 'accurate' in the sense that South Australia doesn't share power across the Nuallabor to Western Australia and many northern towns are 'independant' of any state or territory grid, running on a local generation basis.

Doesn't show Pine Gap or the Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt base either . . . :-)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Communication_Station_Ha...

(Ground to space and Ground to underwater communications)

Australia is miniscule by global standards and Alice Springs is miniscule by Australian standards. Alice Springs isn't connected to the grid servicing most of Australia's population crammed up along the East coast and doesn't have much in the way of heavy industrial users nearby. The difficulty for OSM mappers is the low-capacity above-ground power lines in Alice Springs have no more pixels as the trunk of any 20 year old tree so at satellite imagery resolutions of >30cm you may need to find an image taken at sunrise or sunset where the long shadow of a pole is visible on the ground. I also think it is preferred in remote locations such as Alice Springs to run lines underground (particularly along roads) due to decreased total cost of ownership of not having to worry about bushfire and flood damage to infrastructure.

The ACT government provides ~10cm aerial imagery of Canberra and surrounds a few times a year and from this imagery, unless a minor power pole is obscured by trees or a building, it is generally easy to identify most poles. Evoenergy (distribution operator for the ACT) also publicly provide detailed maps of poles and lines no matter how minor they are. The reason this detail won't be mapped in OSM is lack of interest and availability of mappers to micro-map every minor power pole from aerial imagery, and OSM's very conservative approach to importing datasets, particularly from a licensing perspective (e.g. attempting to apply European database directive concerns in countries like Australia which don't have equivalent laws, and even have opposing case law precedents).

Australia is one of the most open countries when it comes to supplying electrical grid data. Even underground conduit locations are available publicly for most distributors, as well as designed summer/winter constraints for each transmission line (e.g. maximum kA per line). See [1] for some links to maps and other data that is made publicly available.

[1] https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20%3Foperator%20%3Foperat...

It is possible and likely that some data was not yet mapped in OpenStreetMap. So it is missing in OpenStreetMap-based map.

Feel free to edit it if you can!

(even if this specific data is not possible to be added by you - feel free to add say nearby shop or park)

ad: if you have Android I can recommend StreetComplete (great for newbies)

if you have iPhone - GoMap!! is great though a bit more complicated to use

Vespucci is more complicated and more powerful than StreetComplete editor for Android phones

or you can edit directly on osm.org from desktop

-------------

disclaimer: I am a walking conflict of interest as far as OSM goes (for start, I am StreetComplete contributor)

Yeah, I see some data in my city where a plant was closed and demolished 4 years ago and is still listed on there.

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.

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

Yeah, ultra high voltage DC power lines have something like 3.5% loss per 1000km. American sun belt to European sun belt is at least 6000km, so you just gotta eat the 20% loss. Same ballpark as pumped hydro storage.

6000km sounds like a lot, but the Chinese have built a 3000km UHVDC line delivering 12 GW, and putting down submarine communications cables this long is complete routine today. Would be interesting how much aluminium/lead/copper such a project would take. EDIT: found a supplier that specifies a 1GW cable at 7000 tons per spool. A spool is 130km of cable, so that's 350 000 tons of cable per GW for the transatlantic link. So just the raw aluminium is around a billion dollars per GW.

Anyway, first we have to properly connect those two sun belts to the rest of their own continental masses with UHVDC, then we have a lot of political problems to solve, and then we can check battery prices...

the Nato-L project [1] trying to get this done between Europe and North-America. 2 of the founders are the guys behind the (very interesting) redefining-energy podcast [2].

[1]: https://nato-l.com/ [2]: https://redefining-energy.com/

For the Netherlands (and surrounding countries), there is Hoogspanningsnet (the high-voltage grid), which is maintained by infrastructure enthusiasts: https://webkaart.hoogspanningsnet.com/

Telecom just seems to show data centers? Was hoping to see where cable/fiber lines.

ahh cool, that layer was hidden by default... and now I see all the data centers I mapped in OSM show up!

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.

If you want more up-to-date/accurate data on NZ transmission infrastructure there is also the following "Point" geometry tagged per OSM conventions:

[1] Transpower pylons: https://alltheplaces-data.openaddresses.io/map.html?show=htt...

[2] Transpower substations: https://alltheplaces-data.openaddresses.io/map.html?show=htt...

The public source of this data (ArcGIS Feature Server account of Transpower) shows data last modified by Transpower in October 2025 for pylons and February 2025 for substations. At the rate of development of NZ, you wouldn't expect major changes to any of this data unless it's a major transmission upgrade project identified years in advance in hundreds of public announcements and documents.

For distribution, the largest distributor in NZ (Vector) provides "Line" geometry at https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?url=https:/... (note: not included in AllThePlaces due to ATP not currently collecting geometry other than points)

You can update the data in Open Street Map. Theres a lot of incorrect data in there, but it can only be as good as the data thats been entered.

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 lists 'Centrale Hemweg' (Amsterdam). This plant was decommissioned 6 years ago. How up to date is this data?

It gets its data from Open Street Map, so it's only up-to-date if volunteers are keeping it up-to-date.

That said, https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_Hemweg says the plant was converted to natural gas, not decommissioned, in 2019, and this is correctly reflected in Open Street Map / Open Infra Map. Do you have a citation that contradicts this?

It is a great tool for terrorist attacks: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgrpzn6gz4o

So is Wikipedia, the internet in general, the library, Home Depot, a rental vehicle, or a basic working knowledge of chemistry. What’s the point in stating the obvious?

I'm pretty sure ICE has access to all this information already.

It seems to me that past civilisations on earth were more evolved given their railway infrastructure. Incredible.

Nothing in Alaska?

likely it was not yet mapped in OpenStreetMap!

So it is missing in OpenStreetMap-based map.

Feel free to edit it if you can!

(even if this specific data is not possible to be added by you - feel free to add say nearby shop or park)

ad: if you have Android I can recommend StreetComplete (great for newbies)

if you have iPhone - GoMap!! is great though a bit more complicated to use

Vespucci is more complicated and more powerful than StreetComplete editor for Android phones

or you can edit directly on osm.org from desktop

-------------

disclaimer: I am a walking conflict of interest as far as OSM goes (for start, I am StreetComplete contributor)

Is this a guide for Russian saboteurs?

No, it’s a map of infrastructure.

This is a bad idea in terms of security in war

Or a good one, forcing governments to have robust infrastructure that this info isn't useful. Similar reasoning as with security and open source software.

Yeah, and it’s not like the enemy would take the information from here, they already have it and likely even more detailed. It is quite basic stuff to have when preparing to defend (or attack).

Berlin, Germany just had a blackout because a left from centre organisation decided to set an electric exchange on fire. Right over new years and at a very cold time of year.

Apparently the data on where the exchange was and how it would affect the surrounding neighbourhoods was openly available. The neighbourhoods affect were largely affluent.

It’s probably also the reason why this is being reshared.

So what? The benefits of openly sharing this info greatly outweight the risks.

I heard multiple times that professionals in the energy sector relied on shitty, difficult to obtain and incomplete information until the open source revolution.

Soviet Union heavily edited publicly available maps, although it had great cartography for the military-industrial complex. And where it is now?

So what?

Have I said that it's bad or good? I was just pointing out that yes, apparently data like this does get used in for bad things. I am not judging, as you seem to assume, I'm pointing out.

It's a pity that others aren't as broad minded to consider both or all sides of technology. Technology isn't always automatically an improvement of the current situation. Yes it might solve the obvious problem but there are also side effects. Social media, for example, is a good demonstration of a bunch of side effects that weren't intended.

And so it is with open infrastructure, it can have unwanted side effects and we should be aware of those instead of hand waving them away. Mitigation here is difficult: open access and meshing up of data is important and should be encouraged. Hiding this data away won't help.

> Have I said that it's bad or good?

…and then you go on to imply it has bad side effects. But you haven’t actually made that case. Do you really believe that a hostile group would have difficulty finding important infrastructure to attack without an open infrastructure map?

> Do you really believe that a hostile group would have difficulty finding important infrastructure to attack without an open infrastructure map?

I honestly do. A large part of what protects open, free societies is that the smartest people generally have better things to do than blowing shit up. If you’ve ever taken a close look at any heavy infrastructure, it should strike you how easy it would be to break into and disable (particularly if you aren’t concerned about getting caught).

On the balance, I still prefer these data being open. But there probably is a domestic-terrorism risk that’s amplified.

If you are not interested in disrupting the grid then yes - you implied it’s bad. You only mentioned the bad sides of such info being widely available.

And like already mentioned in more nested comments - it’s not difficult to get such info if you are determined enough.

I stated a fact - it really happened and it was so communicated that the left-of-centre organisation obtained their information online, your assumption that I'm "implying it's bad" is in your head.

Facts are neutral.

You can drive around an area you’re interested in, or look at satellite or aerial photos, to find these facilities. “Security by obscurity” is no more useful here than it is in software systems.

You can also just randomly nuke a country or invade it for its resources.

Or poison the internet with AI generated garbage.

There are many alternatives to acting nefariously, this is just one.

Security by obscurity is actually useful, to some degree.

The location of the recent blackout is here: https://openinframap.org/#12.98/52.43214/13.26948

One can see easily make out the power station Lichterfelde and the affected substation inside of it. The area to the east of the power station was without power between Saturday and Thursday morning.

> The area to the east of the power station

s/east/west/

(I.e., the area left of the power station.)

Most of this physical infrastructure is trivially identifiable in Google Maps.

someone having ability to precisely target other country likely would not be stopped much by need to find power plants themselves

while such open data has also positive effects

have you considered both? it is not like deleting power plant from single map would hide it

disclaimer: I am OpenStreetMap contributor

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