On an incredibly detailed new map, you can look through the world’s 120,000-plus power plants, from solar and wind farms to battery storage and coal and gas plants, along with nearly 3 million miles of transmission lines and hundreds of thousands of substations. Other layers include gas pipelines, flood risk, and power-hungry data centers.
The map was built by Brian Bartholomew, an energy consultant who created it as part of a side project called OpenGridWorks, which provides publicly accessible data and modeling tools for the electric grid. “I’m a big grid infrastructure nerd,” he tells Fast Company. “It’s kind of all I think about all day for my day job.”
It’s fascinating to zoom in and browse. I realized that I live near a community solar farm; a controversial new data center is also in the permitting stage not far away. But it also helps make bigger patterns clear.
“If you just look at the U.S. and turn on wind farms, for instance, you can see them cut right through the windy heartland,” Bartholomew says. “If you turn on solar farms and watch them scale over time, you’ll see them pop up first in the regions where they’re heavily subsidized . . . then the economics follow and push on beyond subsidies [in places like] Texas.”
Bartholomew uses the tool in his own work helping utilities and grid operators optimize equipment and plan new projects. (His own private version includes additional data layers that he uses for modeling, including how much capacity is on the grid and land, zoning information, and where tax credits may be available). Since he released the map, he says, utilities and other developers have reached out asking to use versions of the tool.
The map pulls data from OpenStreetMap, Global Energy Monitor, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and other sources. Bartholomew isn’t a software engineer, but used Claude Code and Codex to build the map in his spare time over the course of a few months.
“Implementing it is kind of like magic, because you’re talking to your computer and telling it in plain language what you want to happen,” he says. MapLibre, another tool, “lets you visualize millions of data points in a web browser in a way where it doesn’t set your computer on fire.”
Bartholomew is expanding the project, developing public grid-modeling tools that let users examine how new data centers affect the power system and what mix of energy sources could meet their needs affordably and cleanly. “I think there’s still so much juice in great publicly available data and models that can be used for public benefit,” he says.