Education Policy, Business and Technology

Researchers Crowdsource Creation of Worldwide Map of Power Grid

Campus Technology: Researchers at the Technical University of Munich are crowdsourcing collection of data related to the world's power grid and freely sharing the results with others. The importance of the project is to provide a planning tool that will be useful as the world converts more broadly to renewable forms of energy in the face of climate change.

OpenGridMap, as it's called, uses volunteers armed with an app on their smartphones to capture photos and location information related to the electrical infrastructure — high-voltage and low-voltage power lines, transformer substations, wind turbines and solar power plants.

That data is shuttled to a server in the Department of Computer Science at TU Munich, where it helps build out a map of electric power grids worldwide.

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