Open Infrastructure Map

A new line was put in in 2018 for $130mm. "The new transmission line is an addition to the original line which began commercial service in 1974 and had been experiencing reliability issues. The original line will be used a backup, should it be needed."

https://www.ladwpnews.com/ladwp-completes-construction-of-th...

Alot of that info is probably already publicly available as GIS datasets. Many counties and cities have surprisingly good web interfaces to such information or at least will let you download it. Most people probably use it to look up land parcel information, but they usually include many more layers such hydrants, water and sewer, sometimes detailed local electrical grid info depending how local utilities operate.

Someone should make a crawler that specifically looks for GIS data on government pages and auto-adds it if passes sanity checks and is up-to-date.

certainly US legal questions apply, but what about other criteria? avoiding simplistic responses.. nations have responded differently to mapping and open maps. A recent UNGGIM report showed that close to fifteen (edit not thirty) percent of nations politically recognized worldwide, do not publish national maps themselves in any meaningful way. Next consider the case of the UK Commonwealth Nations, who generally considered maps and mapping to be Crown authorized only, until a certain date not long ago. Opposite to that is the nation of China, which I think forbids all mapping of anything at all, to be done or publicly published, without a license from the single political party government. Other interesting cases abound, in fact, most nations have unique stories and solutions.

I suggest we avoid simplistic responses or carefully worded trap questions from a Defense point of view only, and really engage in a civil manner, about a topic that does have Defense elements, but also real civilian elements, too.

OSM contains errors and I don't know how to fix them. For example, it shows a 115kv line that branches off into Palo Alto and back out through Mountain Veiw before rejoining the main line along Steven's Creek. This line is NOT continuous and in fact only the part north from the Palo Alto substation is active. That's the section that was hit by the small plane carrying Tesla execs a number of years back. That incident knocked the entire city offline because the other part of the line I'm talking about is NOT hooked up.

If you leave a note anonymously on http://osm.org and then link it here in a reply. I would be happy to add it for you, link to the wikipedia/wikidata page for the power station if there is one. There is a lot that can be tagged if you look at the documentation try to include as much information as possible.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:power%3Dplant

If you want you can simply map it.

Go to openstreetmap.org, sign up for an account, login (top right) and then press the "Edit" button.

There will be offer of tutorial, I recommend going though it.

This in editing: select that you want to add point/area, create it and search for power plant in top left. Select it, add more detail if able and save the edit (save button in top right, then enter description of edit in sidebar on the left and press save button).

Edits go live immediately, but data consumers update with some delay depending on their setup (ranges from up to 60 second delay for ones using minutely updates to "no updates").

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See also https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Contact_channels - there are active communities using IRC, Discord, Slack, Telegram, mailing lists and other communications tools.

Feel free to join them and ask for help!

Check out the about page: https://openinframap.org/about

You probably just need to tag the building "power: plant" on https://www.openstreetmap.org/.

There are various degrees of clear. You might be surprised by how much scrub can grow there between clearances. Also the grade of the land can change quite abruptly. It's not like a railroad right of way where the grade is very limited. There can be significant ravines between pylons. The powerlines don't care because they're up above it all anyway. Pipelines likely have better paths but I suspect those are monitored more closely than power lines.

From what I've observed as a hiker, brush clearance can be touch and go. In some regions it doesn't take many years of neglect to turn a clearing into an impassable thicket. Also, a power line can go practically up the side of a mountain, cross streams and ravines, etc.

At least where I live in Ontario, the corridors are not necessarily public land and the power distributor only has access to them through an easement.

In my hometown state forest, no trouble.

I used to work in those circles ~15 years ago and the short answer was: Yes.

It turns out that an absurd amount of sensitive/national security information is actually public but it becomes sensitive once it's organized in a way that it becomes "actionable" for attack, compromise, etc. In my particular situation, an acquaintance studying operations+logistics had overlaid communications trunks with transportation hubs and realized many of them were one in the same.

Now that more of this information is available easily and in readily combinable forms should make us re-evaluate all of it and how much gets shared, with who, when, and to what detail.

Btw, this is also a reason you should be skeptical whenever there's a leak and someone claims "none of this data is classified!" While technically true, a piece of non-classified but relatively unknown information might be the missing piece that makes something actionable.

Not necessarily, there's a huge drive at the moment (in the UK at least) encouraging utility companies to make their asset related data open and publicly available. Look up the Energy Networks Association's Open Networks initiative, quite interesting. The same approach is being taken by other European countries.

It was a major blocker when I was writing my dissertation. It would have been WONDERFUL to have this.

It is pointless to 'hide' the things which are accessible to anyone, including people who isn't even there physically, eg can look through Google Earth or just browse photos with geo-tags.

Back in the day it could be (and sometimes was) a secret or protected information.

It's built on OpenStreetMap data, so you can start contributing by clicking the 'Edit' button on openstreetmap.org

Here's the OSM wiki entry on how to map power lines: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Power_lines

The data seems to be from OpenStreetMap. Features which do not currently exist are out of scope for OSM.

I think that osmand uses vectorial maps by default and this is image tiles.