Open source software mapping world's energy infrastructure

A new open source planning tool hopes to create what researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) are calling the ‘global energy turnaround’. In order to understand existing infrastructure, the team have developed the OpenGridMap app, which they hope will answer questions such as: How much electricity flows through the grid?; When and where?; Where are the bottlenecks?; and, What happens when wind turbines and solar cells feed in additional energy?

Hundreds of volunteers are using the smartphone app in cities including Munich, Berlin, Tokyo and Tehran to gather data on existing electrical infrastructure including high- and low-voltage powerlines, transformer substations, wind turbines and power plants.

Users of the app share photos and locations with a server housed in the Department of Computer Science at TUM. The information is then analysed, evaluated and ultimately loaded into the open source OpenStreetMap map system.

The goal is a map of electric power grids worldwide.

“This is a prerequisite for the energy turnaround — not only here in Germany, but in all countries around the world. You can only plan the restructuring of the energy supply if you know exactly where powerlines are located and at which locations power from high-voltage lines is transformed and fed into the low-voltage networks,” said Prof. Hans-Arno Jacobsen, director of the Department of Energy Informatics and Middleware at TUM.

Building on this foundation, it is possible, for example, to simulate how feeding in renewable energy will affect the grid and where bottlenecks or surplus capacity will arise and where it might make sense to build storage facilities.

What is lacking thus far is a solid pool of data, said Jose Rivera, director of the OpenGridMap project.

“Of course every power utility knows its own grids, but there are many power companies and very few open their data to the public. This is compounded in emerging markets by the fact that the information is frequently not even digitised. Contracting a company to compile the infrastructure for an entire country, or even the entire world, would not be affordable for the researchers,” Rivera said.

The cost-effective alternative is crowd sourcing. The TUM team did not have to start at zero — a community of volunteers has been collecting data for the Wiki global map OpenStreetMap for over 10 years and this publicly accessible dataset also contains information on electric power grids. However, the data is not complete, nor verified, which is exactly what Rivera is now hoping to change.

Six months ago a researcher from the Department of Energy Informatics and Middleware published his OpenGridMap app on the Google Playstore and has since been looking for volunteers to map wind turbines, solar power plants, transformer substations and powerlines using their mobile phones.

Rivera verifies the information and uploads the data to the open source map, where the network of verified grids is becoming denser by the day. Red lines traverse the map like a mesh of arteries. The denser the mesh of mapped points, the more information can be generated.

In Garching (a city in Germany’s Bavaria), which hosts a particularly large number of active volunteers, the researcher has successfully calculated the location of subterranean powerlines leading to houses using a novel algorithm.

The idea is to make data from the project available to engineers and scientists around the world.

“There are many potential applications for the OpenGridMap.

“You could investigate the feasibility of making a state like Bavaria energy autonomous,” said Jacobsen.

The project has caught the eye of some major players — Siemens is a project mentor and the undertaking receives support from the World Bank. Further funding comes from the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.