GRID · LAND CORRIDORS
How Much Land the Power Grid Takes
Every overhead power line runs down a cleared strip of land — its right-of-way, or easement. The grid doesn’t just need wires; it needs the ground beneath them, kept clear of buildings and trees so the conductors can swing and the towers can stand. This layer takes the same 58,278 high-voltage lines the transmission layer draws and shades the corridor each one occupies, widening with voltage — because taller towers and wider conductor spacing demand more clearance. Add it up and the world’s mapped high-voltage grid occupies roughly 74,141 km² of land, about the size of Panama. The corridor widths here are typical figures by voltage class, drawn illustratively: a real 40-to-85-metre easement is finer than a pixel at world zoom, so the halo is a symbol of the right-of-way, not a measurement of it.
Why higher voltages need wider corridors
A 765 kV line is not just a bigger version of a 220 kV line — it stands on far taller towers, its conductors swing further in the wind, and it needs a wider buffer of empty air around it to stop the voltage arcing to anything nearby. So the easement widens with voltage: from around 40 metres for the lowest backbone tier up to 85 metres and more for the ultra-high-voltage super-grids. The bar shows how the total land corridor splits across the four voltage classes — the workhorse 500 kV tier carries the most because it has the most line, even though each UHV corridor is individually the widest.
Where the corridors run
Because these corridors are the transmission lines, they cluster where the lines are mapped — densest across China, Europe and the United States. As with the lines, read this as a guide to what OpenStreetMap has mapped rather than a definitive league table: the land take is real, but the coverage follows the map.
About this data
The corridors are the high-voltage transmission lines from OpenStreetMap (power=line, ≥ 300 kV, via the Overpass API, ODbL) — the very same 58,278lines the transmission layer draws, so this adds no new source. What’s estimated is the width: real rights-of-way are 40 to 85 metres or so depending on voltage, but the exact figure varies with terrain, tower design, conductor type and national rules, so we apply one typical width per voltage class rather than claim a measured easement for each line. The land-area total (74,141km²) is that length multiplied by those typical widths — a genuine order-of-magnitude estimate, badged as an estimate, not a survey. On the map the corridor is drawn as a soft halo whose width is a symbol of the easement, not its true scale: a real 40-to-85-metre strip is sub-pixel until you zoom right in, so a to-scale corridor would simply be invisible. Coverage follows where OSM mapping is densest (richest US, Europe and China), so this is the land take of the mapped backbone, not a complete census. Derived from the transmission snapshot taken 2026-06-25.