DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18161054
title: Prebuilt Electricity Network for gb-dispatch-model (PyPSA-Eur soft-fork) based on OpenStreetMap Data

description: This is an updated version of https://zenodo.org/records/14144752 (v0.6) to capture latest changes in openstreetmap. It is  a resource for a model focussed on Great Britain and is therefore limited to those European countries that are defined by the NESO FES: Pathways to Net Zero – European Electricity Supply Data Table (ES2):



Austria (AT), Belgium (BE), Czech Republic (CZ), Denmark (DK), Finland (FI), France (FR), Germany (DE), Ireland (IE), Italy (IT), Luxembourg (LU), Netherlands (NL), Norway (NO), Poland (PL), Portugal (PT), Slovenia (SI), Spain (ES), Sweden (SE), Switzerland (CH), United Kingdom (GB)


Changelog from version 0.6 to 2026-01-06:



Reduced number of countries covered (see above list compared to list in below copied text).

new naming convention for virtual buses, retaining the information about the connecting line rather than using an integer. These integers were not unique for specific virtual buses, so they were liable to change when the number of virtual buses in a country changed.


For completeness, below is a direct copy of the preamble to the record of which this resource is an update.

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This dataset contains a topologically connected representation of the European high-voltage grid (220 kV to 750 kV) constructed using OpenStreetMap data. Input data was retrieved using the Overpass turbo API (https://overpass-turbo.eu). A heurisitic cleaning process was used to for lines and links where electrical parameters are incomplete, missing, or ambiguous. Close substations within a radius of 500 m are aggregated to single buses, exact locations of underlying substations is preserved. Unique identifiers for lines and links are preserved, e.g. an AC line/cable with the ID way/83742802-1 can be viewed on OpenStreetMap using the query https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/83742802. A DC line/cable with the ID relation/15781671 can be accessed using the query https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/15781671

A detailed explanation on the background, methodology, and validation can be found in the article published in Nature Scientific Data:



Xiong, B., Fioriti, D., Neumann, F., Riepin, I., Brown, T. Modelling the high-voltage grid using open data for Europe and beyond. Sci Data 12, 277 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04550-7


Countries included in the dataset:



Albania (AL), Austria (AT), Belgium (BE), Bosnia and Herzegovina (BA), Bulgaria (BG), Croatia (HR), Czech Republic (CZ), Denmark (DK), Estonia (EE), Finland (FI), France (FR), Germany (DE), Greece (GR), Hungary (HU), Ireland (IE), Italy (IT), Kosovo (XK), Latvia (LV), Lithuania (LT), Luxembourg (LU), Moldova (MD), Montenegro (ME), Netherlands (NL), North Macedonia (MK), Norway (NO), Poland (PL), Portugal (PT), Romania (RO), Serbia (RS), Slovakia (SK), Slovenia (SI), Spain (ES), Sweden (SE), Switzerland (CH), Ukraine (UA), United Kingdom (GB)


The dataset was constructed as part of the workflow within the open-source, sector-coupling model PyPSA-Eur and will be updated continuously as data and/or the cleaning process improves. 

PyPSA-Eur is an open model dataset of the European power system at the transmission network level that covers the full ENTSO-E area. It can be built using the code provided at https://github.com/PyPSA/PyPSA-eur.

Not all data dependencies are shipped with the code repository, since git is not suited for handling large changing files. Instead we provide separate data bundles to be downloaded and extracted as noted in the documentation.

While the code and provided dataset in PyPSA-Eur is released as free software under the MIT, different licenses and terms of use apply to the underlying input data.

Extract from OpenStreetMap Terms of Use



OpenStreetMap® is open data, licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) by the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF).

You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence. The full legal code explains your rights and responsibilities.

Our documentation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license (CC BY-SA 2.0).


This processed dataset is provided under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL 1.0) license.

Changelog from version 0.5 to 0.6:



Added electric parameters to lines (e.g. nominal current, resistance r, reactance x, susceptance b). This allows the dataset to be used outside of PyPSA/PyPSA-Eur.

Interactive map.html now bundled with the dataset.

Tags columns include what the element contains (e.g. merged lines contain lines that were aggregated together).


Changelog from version 0.4 to 0.5:



Exact locations of original substations and converter stations (interior point/Pole of Inaccessibility) are preserved.

Clustering resolution improved from 5000 to 500 meters.

Lines of same electric parameters are merged, if they cross a virtual bus (that is not a real substation).

Information from OSM relations are used, wherever applicable. To avoid doubling, members (ways) of the relation are dropped in the set of lines, accordingly.

There are now unique transformers for each voltage level in each station. Transformers now have a nominal capacity, representing the maximum of line capacities connected to either side/bus of the transformer (n-0, nominal capacity).

Wherever applicable, OSM IDs are preserved and used in the index of the network components.