Open Infrastructure Map
Key topics
The Open Infrastructure Map has sparked a lively debate about the trade-offs between transparency and security in sharing critical infrastructure data, with some commenters noting that publishing such information was once considered a serious offense, while others point out that secrecy can lead to accidental damage. As one commenter observed, having detailed maps of power lines and cables can help prevent disruptions, but also potentially aid malicious actors. Meanwhile, others are exploring the potential benefits of open data, using it to model the impact of climate change on power outages. The discussion highlights the complex and nuanced nature of "openness" in the modern era.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Active discussionFirst comment
N/A
Peak period
15
2-4h
Avg / period
9.2
Based on 92 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Jan 7, 2026 at 10:31 PM EST
1d ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Jan 7, 2026 at 10:31 PM EST
0s after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
15 comments in 2-4h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Jan 8, 2026 at 6:21 PM EST
23h ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
There are cables not on this map that are uncharted for things like acoustic monitoring & finger printing of vessels.
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.
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.
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.
https://openinframap.org/#5.48/54.077/2.676
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.
For instance professionals in the energy sector relied on shitty, difficult to obtain and incomplete information until the open source revolution.
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 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.
And like already mentioned in more nested comments - it’s not difficult to get such info if you are determined enough.
Facts are neutral.
Or poison the internet with AI generated garbage.
There are many alternatives to acting nefariously, this is just one.
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.)
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
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?
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.
> The Texas Interconnection is maintained as a separate grid for political, rather than technical reasons
[1]: https://nato-l.com/ [2]: https://redefining-energy.com/
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 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...
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)
[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)
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.
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)
https://openinframap.org/#7.17/52.529/1.681
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:
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.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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34358795
Also even in a European context UK power prices aren’t as high as many of its peers.
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?
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 wonder how easy it would be to prepare a query in osm to find all such cases.
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39109185
2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29948473
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.