It is simply difficult to hide. You can just go and look at the infrastructure, after all. I bet almost all the information is from OpenStreetmaps, and people just walked around and added all the power lines, substations and powerplants they saw by hand.

And sure, you can bury the cables, or you can try keeping the output of your powerplants secret. But then the infrastructure nerds (or foreign spies) just count coal hopper railway cars per day and analyze cooling tower dimensions.

Yeah. I get that adversaries can capture their own high res satellite photos and determine this, but this is just handing it to them on a silver platter.

It’s kind of hard to hide electrical transmission line towers and HV->MV electrical substations, let alone power plants or solar fields. Virtually all HV transmission lines and most MV distribution lines are above-ground as they use air as an insulator for economic reasons, same with substations.

A higher amount of distribution lines and substations are underground in dense urban cores and some residential areas, but there’s plenty of above-ground electrical distribution as well.

It’s akin to trying to hide how many skyscrapers exist in the US, they’re highly visible anyways, might as well publish the info so people and companies that live and operate in the US can take advantage of it.

The US government itself publishes more or less the same information: https://www.eia.gov/maps/