First abstract grid model of Germany

Fr 06 März 2015 | -- (permalink)

A first version of an - yet not complete - "abstract" model of the German transmission grid was implemented and successfully generated from OpenStreetMap (OSM) raw data. For this purpose relations with the key "route" and the value "power" containing transmission lines and stations at high and very high voltage levels (220 kV and above) were evaluated.

For the time being only relations with exactly two stations were used and the lengths of the transmission lines between the two stations were estimated. The restriction to relations with exactly two stations was chosen for reasons of simplicity, since the estimation of the segments's length is straightforward in this case. The remaining relations (with more than two stations) will be included in future.

The data is processed using PostgreSQL and stored in relational databases. The model can be applied on any OpenStreetMap data for any region. The results are visualized using QGIS.