Visualization layer for lower admin boundaries and search by location

[brierjon]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. The current electricity map is generally usable at a country level and helps to visualize the power systems, but to residents of the US and possibly other subdivided power grid regions it may not be as easy to leverage for local evaluation. The map's current visual design requires individuals to know what electrical territory they live within or have a good reference for them to locate a local area of interest. The US consumer would likely know their electric utility provider, not their grid interconnect and I doubt many are even familiar with the extent of the providers geographic service area. Without US state boundaries (or further subdivision) being displayed on the Zone view it is difficult to get an accurate reference to an area of interest such as a city. I can't locate exactly where the city where I live on this map and if asked to put a pin I would could get close within the PJM Inter connection, but if I were to live in a city served by Louisville Gas And Electric or near the edge of PJM I could easily pin the wrong interconnection.

Rational: Search uses the term "area" indicating a spacial search, but the search doesn't perform general spacial searches as one would expect results by that term to return the Interconnect applicable to the region at least.

Describe the solution you'd like

1. Add an overlay of geographic boundaries at lower administrative level ie for USA - US State or even US State County
2. Extend search to allow users to search by a location to set a pin on the map for reference and show the applicable Interconnection region in the list. Better yet, return the list of applicable interconnect region for the spacial term in the search and highlight the outline of the area matching the term on the map.

Describe alternatives you've considered Shape files and location metadata should be available from OpenStreetMap or other sources and would allow for user to search by location to lookup on the map (possibly https://nominatim.org/). Future features could leverage the same metadata to provide a side by side comparison of energy between two locations, direction of energy, etc. Both OSM and Nominatim are free with attribution.

Additional context Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here. Trying to identify shapes withing the USA Zone visualization... hard to get a good reference for states not along the border.

Trying to locate where Marietta, Ohio visually lands or generally if the entire state of West Virginia lands in the PJM Interconnection.

Search by location

For consideration, linking somewhere and/or mentioning a complementary map of infrastructure built on OSM data (though there is incomplete mapping of the infrastructure) - https://openinframap.org

[madsnedergaard]

Thanks for raising this feedback in a nice and detailed way! It's definitely also something we're not happy about and want to improve, so we really appreciate your ideas here :)

[teejas]

i was also curious about this, especially the ability to search by location. im going to dig into this a bit and try to get something working with OpenStreetMap/nominatim like @brierjon suggested. what im visualizing is a search box at the top where you can enter a street address or general location (i.e. San Francisco, CA) and zoom to that location on the map and see data pertaining to it.

as a first iteration im just going to add the geocoding in the RankingPanel, so basically when you search a location it will map it to a more general search term (i.e. San Francisco, CA → Northern California, USA or smn). then, if it looks good, later on down the road we can break that search bar out of the rankingpanel and just have it as a fixed part of the main (home) page.