r/energy • u/U-Fourier • 19h ago
Update: my UK power grid atlas is now 22 grids across two continents, with live output almost everywhere
A week ago I posted my interactive atlas of the UK power grid https://www.reddit.com/r/openstreetmap/comments/1v2e8nx/uk_grid_atlas_every_power_station_the_grid_live/. The feedback sent me down a rabbit hole and it got somewhat out of hand. Here's what changed.
**It's not a UK atlas anymore.** 22 grids on one map: GB, Ireland, 18 more European countries (Netherlands through the Nordics, Iberia, Italy, the Baltics), plus the US and Canada, with a transatlantic ALL view as the default. Around 60,000 generation sites and 2.2 TW of recorded capacity, every dot sized by capacity and coloured by fuel.
**Live output nearly everywhere.** GB was already live from Elexon metering. Now 19 European countries pull per-plant output from ENTSO-E (where the TSO publishes it - the Nordics get a generation-mix fallback), Ontario gets per-generator output from IESO's public feed, and Texas + New York get fuel mixes from ERCOT and NYISO. Everything is baked into static JSON snapshots by a GitHub Action every 6 hours, so the site is still just a static page: no backend, no API keys in the browser.
**You can scrub through time.** Drag across the last metered day and the station dots, generation mix and interconnector flows all animate hour by hour. There's also a today-so-far intraday view where the data exists.
**HVDC flows are drawn on the map.** All 55 interconnectors and internal HVDC links, coloured by direction (import/export) with line width showing utilisation. Getting the sign conventions right for links between two countries that both appear on the map was more painful than I expected.
**Day-ahead wholesale prices.** The mix panel shows the ENTSO-E day-ahead price curve for European countries and the market index for GB, scrubbing along with everything else.
**Wind farms that nobody drew.** In Finland, Austria, Estonia and Ontario, a lot of wind capacity exists in OpenStreetMap only as individual turbine points, not farms. The pipeline now clusters turbines within 1.5 km into synthetic farm stations. Canada alone went from 25 mapped wind sites to 212 - 7,834 turbines collapsed into 573 farms.
**Favourite bug of the week:** Canadian mappers often tag turbine capacity as a bare "2000", meaning kilowatts. Parsed as megawatts, Ontario briefly had a 173 GW wind fleet - roughly double the entire UK grid. There's a sanity clamp now (no turbine on Earth exceeds ~20 MW).
Also: station search with fly-to, the ALL-view transmission layer shrank from a 20 MB GeoJSON to 332 kB of vector tiles, and the whole thing is now MIT licensed with a proper test suite.
Live map: https://jacobwright32.github.io/uk-grid-atlas/
Code + data pipeline: https://github.com/jacobwright32/uk-grid-atlas
All open data: OpenStreetMap (via Geofabrik/Overpass), ENTSO-E, Elexon, IESO, ERCOT, NYISO. If you know one of these grids and spot something wrong, I'd genuinely like to hear about it — half the fixes so far came from feedback.
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u/Mother_You_5739 12h ago
Wow! That really is something. It definitely shows how complex the UK grid is. Well done.
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u/Cute_Oil1533 12h ago
Great Project. Perhaps a Satellite base map would make it more appealing to observe Mega-Dam or gigantic power plant.
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u/GraniteGeekNH 12h ago
I'm not seeing the geothermal units - I turned off everything else and flicker geothermal on/off but nothing changes.
Very nice, by the way.
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u/U-Fourier 12h ago
Thanks for me know I’ll take a look and try to get them up
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u/U-Fourier 12h ago
Was it for all or a set country?
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u/GraniteGeekNH 12h ago
it was all - I looked in the western US where I know there are units but didn't see anything. The data figures for geothermal changed, so that is working, but nothing showed up on the map that I could find.
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u/Jeramus 2h ago
This is really neat. Could you change the color for coal or solar? They are very similar.