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 optional administrative boundaries.

Data

Grid2Poster uses OpenStreetMap features tagged as:

• power=line
• power=minor_line when enabled
• power=cable when enabled

Feature completeness depends on OpenStreetMap coverage in the selected country or region.

Contributing to the data

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.

Installation

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

python create_grid_poster.py --country Germany

For large countries, reduce the Overpass query tile size:

python create_grid_poster.py --country France --tile-size-km 150

Export as SVG or PDF for vector workflows:

python create_grid_poster.py --country Spain --format svg
python create_grid_poster.py --country Poland --format pdf

Include additional infrastructure layers:

python create_grid_poster.py --country Germany --include-minor-lines --include-cables

List available themes:

python create_grid_poster.py --list-themes

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:

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.

Export the rendered transmission lines as GeoJSON (WGS84) alongside the poster, for reuse in GIS tools:

python create_grid_poster.py --country Germany --export-geojson
python create_grid_poster.py --country Germany --export-geojson data/germany_grid.geojson

Without a path, the file is written to posters/ next to the poster. The export is a single FeatureCollection of all fetched lines reprojected to EPSG:4326.

Options

Output

Generated posters are written to the posters/ directory by default. Intermediate OSM responses and processed geometries are cached in cache/ to avoid repeated downloads.

Gallery

Poster	Country	Theme
	India	paper_grid
	India	japanese_ink
	Pakistan	electric_midnight
	Vietnam	midnight_blue
	California	warm_beige
	Mexico	forest
	Italy	autumn
	Zambia	sunset

Notes

The script uses the public Overpass API through OSMnx. Large requests may fail or be rate-limited. Use smaller --tile-size-km values for large countries or when the Overpass server is busy.

The map is intended for visualisation and print design. It should not be used as an authoritative grid model.

Attribution

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.