GRID · THE FUTURE GRID

The Grid Being Built

The grid isn’t finished — it’s being extended right now to plug in new wind and solar and to feed the data-centre boom. This is that build-out: 752 planned and under-construction high-voltage corridors at 300kV and above, every one a real line that an OpenStreetMap mapper has tagged as proposed or being built. They’re drawn dashed and in greenso they read apart from the solid network that already carries power — planned is not the same as built.

CORRIDORS752
UNDER CONSTRUCTION654
PROPOSED98
VOLTAGE FLOOR300 kV

How far along

Not every line here is equally certain. Most are under construction— steel in the ground, near-certain to switch on — while the rest are proposed, real plans that may still change. On the map the under-construction corridors are drawn brighter; the proposed ones sit back.

Under construction654
Proposed98
≥ 700 kV (UHV): 13500–699 kV: 108380–499 kV: 605300–379 kV: 26

Where the grid is being built

One honest caveat reads loudest here: about 79% of these corridors are in Europe. That’s partly real — Europe is in a genuine grid-expansion boom to wire up offshore wind and cross-border links — but it’s also because European mappers track grid projects far more thoroughly in OpenStreetMap. So this is a map of where the build-out is mapped, densest across Europe; much of Asia is under-represented at this voltage tier.

595 CORRIDORSEurope
66 CORRIDORSChina
64 CORRIDORSSE Asia
42 CORRIDORSAfrica
22 CORRIDORSMiddle East & C. Asia
14 CORRIDORSSouth America
10 CORRIDORSNorth America
2 CORRIDORSOceania

About this data

Every line here is a real feature from OpenStreetMap that a mapper has explicitly tagged as proposed or under construction (the lifecycle tags proposed:power=line and construction:power=line, via the Overpass API, ODbL) — nothing here is inferred or guessed. It’s baked at the same 300kV floor as the built transmission backbone, so the two layers are the same tier: toggle both and you see the grid that exists in solid blue and the grid being built in dashed green. Coverage follows OpenStreetMap’s mapping, which is heavily Europe-weighted, so treat this as the mappedbuild-out, not a complete global picture. Plans change — a proposed line may be delayed or dropped — which is exactly why proposed and under-construction are drawn differently. Snapshot taken 2026-06-24.