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Comment by CaliforniaKarl | Hacker News Reader

Here in California, the State government has maps of all of the transmission infrastructure, from the generating stations to the utility substations, and the transmission lines in between.

https://www.energy.ca.gov/maps/

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See also https://openinframap.org/ which pulls from OpenStreetMap. (I'm one of the contributors to the mapping of the Bay Area's electrical infrastructure.)

Unrelated but DAAAAMN OpenStreetMap is blowing away Google Maps in terms of performance here.

What you're seeing on that site isn't actually OpenStreetMap. It's data points from OpenStreetMap that are overlayed on top of Mapbox [1], with the vector tiles served up by Tegola.

1: https://docs.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-js/api/

2: https://tegola.io/

Neat. Lots on electrical, though not much on gas pipelines (natural and gasoline). There are some strange ones too, such as fertilizer, that are not mapped.

If you like this type of data, I've been working on an ArcGIS app[1] that incorporates the USDHS transmission infrastructure maps[2] from the western United States (WECC region) with NOAA weather data, US Forest Service wildfire data, and 15-minute market prices from the California ISO's OASIS system.

There's a lot of work to be done and I've used this project to teach myself Python with the ArcGIS Python API, Pandas, GeoPandas, etc.

I'd love to hear feedback from anybody that has something to share.

[1] http://justin-bohlen.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index...

[2] https://hifld-geoplatform.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/elect...

This is cool. I forget how much data is made public by governments for us to “just know about”. This'll be a good time suck one of these weekends.

Public data is a vital component of a democracy.

Strangely, at least in the case of vital infrastructure like this, making the information public also poses a liability. I found it strange as I figure bad actors could surely find this very useful.

This is nice that they make it public, but it has limited value if it doesn't have more information such as:

Real-time generator MVA values Real-time load MVA values Real-time line flows Generator fuel types *Equipment impedances

You need the above for real-time views or for running studies.

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