This visualization shows OpenStreetMap editors collectively adding data about the electricity grid over a period of eight years.  This shows the history of everything tagged with power=* (<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:power">https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:power</a>) in Europe. This includes power plants, wind turbines, PV installations, transformers, pylons, etc. The movie frames each correspond to the state of all the power data at some particular date, which you can see displayed in the bottom right corner. At the beginning of 2007, people have just begun to start tagging the power grid, and now in 2015 the OSM power data has become quite comprehensive, particularly in Western Europe.
<p>See <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://www.itoworld.com/map/106">http://www.itoworld.com/map/106</a> for an interactive map showing the same data based on the latest data from OpenStreetMap.
</p><p>This data is already being used to extract models of the power grid for research purposes: <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://scigrid.de/">http://scigrid.de/</a>
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Visualization made using osm-history-renderer (<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="https://github.com/MaZderMind)/osm-history-renderer">https://github.com/MaZderMind)/osm-history-renderer</a>
<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvZrggs6EbgZYXaU-hZ_alg">Chris Davis</a>
CC BY 3.0
<bdo lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:YouTube_files" title="Commons:YouTube files">YouTube</a>: <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TgQbmWOPHA"><bdi lang="">OpenStreetMap Time Lapse of Electricity Grid Edits</bdi></a> – View/save archived versions on <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TgQbmWOPHA">archive.org</a> and <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://archive.today/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TgQbmWOPHA">archive.today</a></bdo>