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.
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.
There are cables not on this map that are uncharted for things like acoustic monitoring & finger printing of vessels.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
> The Texas Interconnection is maintained as a separate grid for political, rather than technical reasons
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/ERCOT-geographic-footpri...
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.
Unfortunately I don't have a source, and would appreciate a UK national with better understanding than me to chime in :)
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...)
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.
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2021/09/30/20-years-later-...
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.
Also even in a European context UK power prices aren’t as high as many of its peers.
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 also tried to see any vulnerable sabotage spots that would put my electricity out, but that seems harder.
I wonder how easy it would be to prepare a query in osm to find all such cases.
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)
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)
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...
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...
[1]: https://nato-l.com/ [2]: https://redefining-energy.com/
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?
[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)
From what I can see it's pretty complete and up to date for my area.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
s/east/west/
(I.e., the area left of the power station.)
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?
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.
And like already mentioned in more nested comments - it’s not difficult to get such info if you are determined enough.
Facts are neutral.
…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?
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.
Or poison the internet with AI generated garbage.
There are many alternatives to acting nefariously, this is just one.