Energy Tab
The Energy tab puts energy infrastructure on the map — pipelines, power plants, the electric grid, shale plays, and the asset footprints of the major midstream operators. It sits on the rail between Demographics and Legend, and it's built for slides like a pipeline corridor behind a deal map or a plant portfolio over a market area.
It's a separate catalog from Demographics on purpose: Demographics shades regions by a number; Energy draws the infrastructure itself — lines, points, and areas you stack over any map.
Which layers appear depends on what your administrator has enabled, so your list may differ from another firm's.
Finding a layer
The panel opens with a search box and two tabs:
- Active — the layers currently on your map, each with its controls.
- Browse — the full catalog, grouped (EIA Infrastructure, Power & grid, Geology & hazards, Midstream). Typing in search jumps you here and filters by name, source, or tag.
Power & grid covers generation and the network that carries it: power plants, transmission lines, substations, compressor stations, wind turbines, alternative-fuel stations, and Utility-Scale Solar PV — the actual footprint of every large US solar farm, with its capacity, technology and year built. Solar arrays are drawn at their true size, so at a national view they read as specks; zoom into a project area to see the panel blocks properly.
When midstream layers are available, operator chips appear across the top of Browse — All, Kinder Morgan, Plains, Enterprise, Energy Transfer, Williams, Targa, Phillips 66. Pick a chip to see just that company's assets; chips combine with search.
Try before you add
Every Browse row has an eye button: it sketches a quick dashed preview of the layer on the map — a sample, not the full data — with a floating Add to map / Dismiss pill. Previews are never saved with your project; Add loads the layer properly and moves it to your Active stack.
What the layers look like
Each layer arrives styled sensibly, and you can adjust everything from its Active row:
| Control | Applies to | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Colour | All | The layer's colour. Layers that colour themselves by their data — pipelines by interstate/intrastate, power plants by fuel — show a small legend of those colours instead, with a Single colour option if you'd rather flatten them. |
| Width | Lines | Pipeline / transmission line thickness. |
| Size | Points | Dot size. Power plants can instead size by capacity (megawatts), so bigger plants read bigger. |
| Transparency | All | How much the base map shows through. |
| Border / Outline | Points & areas | An outline with a thickness slider. |
| Show labels | Most | Prints a name (operator, plant name, and so on) by each feature, with the standard label controls — position, size, colour, halo. |
| About this layer | All | The source, geometry, and a live count of what's loaded. |
A few midstream layers (Energy Transfer's) are drawn from the company's own map tiles: they display and export like the rest, but they have no labels and don't appear in Focus+ — the row says so.
Energy and your focused region
When you're focused on a state or country, energy layers clip to the focused region — a Texas map shows Texas pipelines. Two per-layer options loosen that:
- Show beyond focus region (Focus mode) — the layer draws across the whole country, useful when a network's full run is the story.
- Show on secondary regions (Focus+) — the layer also draws on your secondary regions, not just the primary selection.
Energy always draws on top of any Demographics shading, so infrastructure stays readable over a heat map.
Geology & hazards
Three context layers ride along with the energy catalog:
- Earthquakes M2.5+ (30d) — a live USGS feed, coloured and sized by magnitude, refreshed every 30 minutes while it's on.
- FEMA Flood Hazard Zones — flood zones for the area in view (zoom in to load them), coloured by zone.
- Federal Tribal Lands — reservation and trust-land boundaries.
Exports and the legend
Active energy layers export with the map in every mode — including Focus+ — and they appear in the standalone Legend as swatch rows: a line stroke for pipelines, a dot for plants, a shaded patch for areas, one row per category for coloured-by-data layers (for example, "Power Plants — Gas"). Legend rows rename, hide, and reorder like any other entry.
Loaded energy data stays loaded for the session — toggling, panning, and mode switches redraw instantly, and a reopened project repaints from your browser's local cache.
For administrators
Energy layers are managed in the same admin back office as Demographics, under Data Overlays, on their own Energy tab — kept separate from Census & MSA so the two catalogs never mix. There a system administrator adds, edits, tests, enables, and removes the energy sources each organization sees: the Shown switch controls whether a layer appears in a user's Browse list, and Test runs a server-side health check on the source (green ok or red fail, with the latency and any error on hover). Use Test all before a demo to catch a source that's gone down.
The catalog comes pre-loaded with the full energy set — EIA infrastructure, the electric grid, geology and hazards, and the seven midstream operators — so day to day this is mostly enabling the layers a firm wants and keeping them healthy. Two things are specific to energy:
- A layer's provider is its operator. For the midstream layers, the Provider field (Kinder Morgan, Plains, Enterprise, Energy Transfer, Williams, Targa, Phillips 66) is what groups the layer under the matching operator chip in a user's Browse list.
- Energy Transfer layers use a rotating token. Those layers draw from Energy Transfer's own map tiles through an access token carried in the layer's service URL, and that token changes from time to time. If an Energy Transfer layer stops loading — its Test reads fail, or users report it blank — edit the layer, refresh the token in its URL, and test again.