Design posters showcasing your country's electrical grid

Generate print-ready posters of electrical grid infrastructure from OpenStreetMap data. Transmission lines for a country or continent are downloaded and rendered with GeoPandas, OSMnx, and Matplotlib. The project is heavily inspired and reused styling from maptoposter. Grid2Poster supports countries, states, provinces and continents, as well as predefined regions. Grid2Poster uses OpenStreetMap features tagged as: Feature completeness depends on OpenStreetMap coverage in the selected country or region. 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. python -m venv .venv source .venv/bin/activate pip install -r requirements.txt Usage By default every run writes both a PNG and an SVG: python create_grid_poster.py --country Portugal For large countries, reduce the Overpass query tile size: python create_grid_poster.py --country Vietnam --tile-size-km 150 Include distribution grids if available. Coverage various significatly across the globe: 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 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. Option Default Description --country - Country or region name resolvable by Nominatim, a continent name (Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, South America), or the aggregate Global --boundary-geojson - Path to a local GeoJSON file with polygonal boundary features. Overrides the Nominatim/Natural Earth lookup. Useful for custom regions, sub-national areas, or offline workflows. --display-country value of --country Text to print on the poster. Useful when the geocoder name differs from the desired title. --subtitle ELECTRICAL TRANSMISSION GRID (or ELECTRICAL GRID with --include-minor-lines) Override the subtitle printed under the country/region name. --padding 0.10 Fractional padding around the boundary bounds. Lower values zoom in (0 = tight fit, -0.05 = crop slightly into the bounds); higher values pull the view out. --theme paper_grid Theme ID from the themes/ directory. --list-themes - List available themes and exit. --include-minor-lines off Also fetch power=minor_line features. --include-cables / --no-include-cables on Fetch power=cable features (underground/submarine). On by default; pass --no-include-cables to skip. --include-outlying off Keep overseas territories and other polygons far from the main landmass. By default the geocoded boundary is filtered to the mainland (and nearby islands), so posters for countries like the Netherlands or France do not include Aruba, Curaçao, French Guiana, etc. --paper-size - Named preset, portrait orientation. Overrides --width/--height. Choices: a5, a4, a3, a2, a1, a0, letter, legal, tabloid. Combine with --landscape to flip. --width 297.0 Poster width in millimeters (default: A3 short side). --height 420.0 Poster height in millimeters (default: A3 long side). --landscape off Render in landscape (horizontal) orientation. Swaps width and height if width < height. --dpi 300 Raster output DPI (applies to PNG output). --title-size auto Title font size in points. Auto-scaled from poster size by default; set to override. --tile-size-km 200 Overpass query tile size in kilometers. Use smaller values for very large countries or busy servers. --format png svg Output format(s): any combination of png, svg, pdf. Multiple values are written in one run. --output auto-generated in posters/ Output file path. When set, only a single file is written and its format is inferred from the extension. --crs EPSG:3857 Projection used for rendering. EPSG:3857

Design posters showcasing your country's electrical grid

Key takeaways

More in computer-science