GRID · BATTERY STORAGE
Where the Grid Banks Energy
The other Grid layers show electricity being made (power plants, wind and solar), moved (transmission and HVDC) and used (data centres, EVs). This one shows where it is banked. A grid has to match supply and demand second by second, but the wind blows and the sun shines on their own schedule — so the grid increasingly leans on 1,023 battery-storage plants that soak up power when there is a surplus and push it back when there is a shortfall. They are drawn as battery cells, sized by capacity in megawatts: the grid-scale giants anchor the world view and the smaller plants reveal as you zoom in. Capacity is mapped on about 83%— the rest draw at the smallest size rather than invent a number. Tap a cell for its name, capacity and country.
From cabinets to power banks
Battery plants run from a shipping-container cabinet smoothing a local feeder to a sprawling grid-scale “power bank” that can swallow a gigawatt. The map sizes every cell by its capacity in megawatts; here is how the mapped fleet divides by scale:
The biggest batteries
Unlike most of the OpenStreetMap layers, the headline giants here really are global: the largest plants span the United States, Australia, China and Germany, each banking hundreds of megawatts. These are the biggest singleplants as tagged in OSM, with any capacity tag above 1.2 GW clamped so a mis-tag can’t crown the list:
Where the plants are mapped
This is the most globally-balanced of the OpenStreetMap layers — the giants above show storage is being tagged on every continent. But the long tail still leans to where OSM is mapped most completely: about 48% of these plants sit in Europe, with North America close behind. The clearest gap is China, which is building grid storage faster than anywhere on Earth yet shows up at only around a tenth of the set, because much of its fleet isn’t mapped into OSM. So read the European and North American density as solid, and the sparseness elsewhere — China especially — as missing data, not missing batteries.
About this data
Every plant comes from OpenStreetMap (power=plant with plant:source=battery, via the Overpass API, ODbL) — the 1,023 grid-scale battery plants OSM knows about. Capacity (the plant:output:electricity tag) is recorded on about 83% of them, so capacitysets the size; it’s drawn on a square-root scale and clampedat 1.2 GW so a single mis-tag can’t paint a monster cell, and plants with no capacity tag draw at the smallest size rather than a fabricated one. Operators are never shown (the no-recon rule). The honest limit is coverage: it leans ~48% Europe by OSM mapping completeness, with China under-mapped — so this is the publicly mapped fleet, not a complete census, even though the biggest plants are captured worldwide. Snapshot taken 2026-06-26.