Grid2Poster

Generate print-ready posters of electrical grid infrastructure from OpenStreetMap data. Browse the rendered posters in the online gallery. Transmission lines for a country or continent are downloaded and rendered with GeoPandas, OSMnx, and Matplotlib. Grid2Poster is heavily inspired by maptoposter and reuses some of its styling.

Grid2Poster supports countries, states, provinces and continents, as well as predefined regions. Browse more stunnding poster in the grid2poster gallery.

Data

Grid2Poster uses OpenStreetMap features tagged as:

• power=line
• power=minor_line when enabled
• power=cable when enabled
• power=plant when enabled

Feature completeness depends on OpenStreetMap coverage in the selected country or region.

Contributing to the data

Coverage and quality in your country can be improved by mapping transmission infrastructure directly in OpenStreetMap. MapYourGrid is a community initiative that coordinates this work. It provides tutorials, country-level completeness/quality statistics and mapping tools for tracing power lines, generators and substations from imagery. With Open Infrastructure Map you can browse all the electrical grid data in OpenStreetMap.

Get inspired by the Gallery

Preprinted posters in various styles and A3 are available for most regions of the world in our grid2poster gallery:

Installation

The project lives in two branches: the main branch and the gh-pages branch. To create your own posters, clone the main branch with the --single-branch flag, as the gh-pages branch contains all the gallery plots and is therefore massive.

git clone --single-branch https://github.com/open-energy-transition/grid2poster 
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

To create a poster for a country, state or province, use the --country option to resolve the boundaries via Nominatim. Setting a large '--tile-size-km' in kilometres and '--tile-delay' in seconds reduces the timeout of the Overpass server. By default, every run creates both a PNG and an SVG file.

By default posters print at A3 portrait (297 × 420 mm) at 300 DPI. Use --paper-size for another named preset, --width/--height for custom millimeter dimensions, and --landscape to flip orientation.

python create_grid_poster.py --country Brazil --tile-delay 30 --tile-size-km 500

Depending on the size of the country and whether distribution grids are excluded, loading the data via a single query (--single-query) is much faster. For large countries with lots of distribution grids, the data should be loaded in multiple tiles:

python create_grid_poster.py --country Pakistan --single-query

Include distribution grids if available. Grid coverage varies significantly across the globe and is mainly only available in Europe and North America.

python create_grid_poster.py --country Germany --include-minor-lines

List available themes. Create a new theme JSON file in the 'themes' directory to find your own style.

python create_grid_poster.py --list-themes

Once a region's data has been loaded, re-rendering it with another theme is much faster: the boundaries and OSM power features are served from the cache instead of being downloaded again. This makes it cheap to experiment with different styles for the same country.

python create_grid_poster.py --country Brazil --theme neon_cyberpunk
python create_grid_poster.py --country Brazil --theme paper_grid     # reuses the cached data

A theme JSON defines colors per voltage tier (line_unknown, line_low, line_mid, line_high, line_extra). It may optionally also set the line thickness (in points) per tier with lw_unknown, lw_low, lw_mid, lw_high, lw_extra, and lw_minor. Any width key you omit falls back to the built-in default for that tier.

Cables (--include-cables, underground/submarine) inherit their voltage-tier color and a dampened width by default. A theme may override this with cable_color (a hex color used for all cables instead of the tier color) and cable_lw_scale (the multiplier applied to the tier line width; defaults to 0.5). Omit them to keep the current behavior.

Power plants (--show-plants) are drawn as markers sized by installed capacity (plant:output:electricity, square-root area scaling) and colored by generation source (plant:source), bucketed into solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, coal, gas, oil, biomass and other. Marker colors are derived automatically from each theme's palette so they fit the poster style; a theme may pin any bucket explicitly with plant_solar, plant_wind, plant_hydro, plant_nuclear, plant_coal, plant_gas, plant_oil, plant_biomass, plant_other, and override the marker outline with plant_edge. A second metadata row lists the installed GW per source. Use --min-plant-capacity to hide small plants and --plant-marker-scale to tune marker sizes.

python create_grid_poster.py --country Austria --show-plants --min-plant-capacity 10

Use a local GeoJSON file as the boundary instead of geocoding (handy for custom regions or sub-national areas). All polygonal features in the file are dissolved into a single boundary. The --country value is still used for the poster title and output filename. --landscape will render in landscape (horizontal) orientation.

python create_grid_poster.py --country "Middle East and North Africa" --boundary-geojson ./regions/mena.geojson --landscape --theme neon_cyberpunk 

Render an entire continent. Continent boundaries come from the Natural Earth admin-0 dataset (downloaded and cached on first use) because Nominatim does not resolve continent names. Accepted values are Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, and South America. The aggregate name Global combines every inhabited continent.

python create_grid_poster.py --country Africa --tile-size-km 500

Continent-scale runs hit the Overpass API hundreds of times and can take several hours. A larger --tile-size-km cuts the number of queries; pick a value that still stays under the Overpass per-query size limit.

Global posters and atlas themes

--country Global renders the whole inhabited world as the union of the continents, clipped to a tight bounding box so it fills the page. It is the longest job in the tool (many hundreds of Overpass queries, several hours), so use a large --tile-size-km, a generous --tile-delay, and high --voltage-tiers so HV/EHV lines stand out at world scale. The themes/ directory ships three palettes tuned for this scale: global_grid_atlas (dark atlas), global_grid_atlas_neon (neon), and global_paper_grid_atlas (warm paper).

python create_grid_poster.py --country Global \
  --display-country "The Global Electrical Transmission Grid" --subtitle "Electrify Everything" \
  --theme global_grid_atlas_neon --landscape --paper-size a0 \
  --tile-size-km 1000 --tile-delay 30 --voltage-tiers 110,220,400,765 --padding -0.1

If the default Overpass endpoint (overpass-api.de) is rate-limiting or refusing connections, switch to a mirror with --overpass-endpoint:

python create_grid_poster.py --country Germany --overpass-endpoint https://overpass.kumi.systems/api/interpreter

Other public mirrors include https://overpass.private.coffee/api/interpreter.

A complex example

Most options can be combined in a single run. The command below renders the continental European grid in the monochrome_density theme, pulling in distribution (--include-minor-lines) and underground/submarine (--include-cables) infrastructure, and tuning the framing and download behaviour:

python3 create_grid_poster.py --country "Europe" --boundary-geojson ./regions/europe.geojson \
  --tile-size-km 800 --include-cables --include-minor-lines --theme monochrome_density \
  --tile-delay 30 --landscape --shift-y 0.18 --padding -0.35 --no-cache --cable-sea-buffer-km 500

What each flag contributes:

• --boundary-geojson ./regions/europe.geojson - use the predefined 37-unit Europe boundary instead of geocoding.
• --tile-size-km 800 with --tile-delay 30 - fewer, larger Overpass tiles spaced 30 s apart to stay under per-query limits without tripping rate limits.
• --include-minor-lines / --include-cables - add power=minor_line and power=cable features on top of the transmission lines.
• --cable-sea-buffer-km 500 - inflate the boundary 500 km over water so long submarine cables survive coastline clipping.
• --theme monochrome_density / --landscape - black-on-cream density styling in horizontal orientation.
• --shift-y 0.18 and --padding -0.35 - push the grid up by 18 % and crop tightly into the bounds for a full-bleed composition.
• --no-cache - ignore any cached data on this run and fetch fresh (results are still written back to the cache).

Options

Output

Generated posters are written to the posters/ directory by default. Intermediate OSM responses and processed geometries are cached in cache/ to avoid repeated downloads. Because of this cache, the first render of a region is the slow one - every subsequent run for that region (for example with a different theme) skips the downloads and is much faster.

Gallery

Predefined regions

The regions/ directory ships with multi-country boundaries that map to common power-system groupings. Pass any of them via --boundary-geojson and set --country to the title you want printed on the poster:

python create_grid_poster.py --country "Europe" --boundary-geojson ./regions/europe.geojson --tile-size-km 300

For ad-hoc areas (a single state, a metro region, a custom polygon), supply your own GeoJSON via --boundary-geojson. All polygonal features in the file are dissolved into one boundary.

Contributing posters

The online gallery is served from the orphan gh-pages branch, which has no shared history with main. The install instructions above use --single-branch main and therefore do not fetch it.Fetch it explicitly the first time you contribute:

git fetch origin gh-pages

To add a poster:

1. Render it from main with create_grid_poster.py.

   python create_grid_poster.py --country Spain --theme paper_grid
   

2. Move the PNG (and SVG, if you want to offer the vector download) out of posters/ so it survives the branch switch, then switch to gh-pages:

   mv posters/spain_grid_paper_grid_*.png /tmp/
   git checkout gh-pages
   mv /tmp/spain_grid_paper_grid_*.png posters/
   

3. Rebuild the manifest and commit:

   python build_manifest.py
   git add posters/ 
   git commit -m "Add Spain (paper_grid)"
   

4. Open a pull request targeting gh-pages (not main).

Attribution

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.