Does EIA publish the location of electric power plants and transmission lines?
The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) interactive U.S. Energy Atlas has an electricity map application and a data catalog, which include locations and data for:
- Power plants with a combined electric generation nameplate capacity of at least 1 megawatt (MW) that are operating, on standby, or out of service (short or long term). The attribute data for the power plant layer includes street address, zip code, city, county, state, latitude, and longitude for each power plant, as well as other data about the plant.
- Electric transmission lines with voltages varying from 69 kilovolts (kV) to 765 kV (alternate current (AC) and direct current (DC) lines).
EIA is the source of the power plant layer metadata. Users can access the power plant data (as well as data on electric power transmission line border crossings) from the data catalog to explore and download data in shapefiles, spreadsheets, KML files, and geodatabase formats, or link to Application Programming Interface (API). Much of the data for power plants that are included in the Energy Atlas data files are also in the "PlantYyyyy" file of the annual survey Form EIA-860 database. The county, state, latitude, and longitude of U.S. power plants are also in the monthly EIA-860M data files.
While the Energy Atlas includes a map layer for electric power transmission lines, EIA is not the source for the data for that layer. The data and shapefiles for electric transmission lines are available from Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD) geoservice. You should contact HIFLD directly regarding their data. EIA and HIFLD do not publish the location of electric substations.
EIA does not publish similar maps or geographic information on the location of electric power plants or transmission lines in any other countries.
Last updated: May 24, 2023
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