Boston Energy Atlas

A tool to explore the palimpsest of the Boston energy grid and make sense of what matters to you as the end user.

Palimpsest: a page that has been written over, where traces of the earlier writing remain.

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What this atlas is

The Boston Energy Atlas is a public data map of the city’s energy grid: the wires and gas pipes on each street, who owns them, what they cost, and the decisions behind each. The grid was not built all at once. Each generation added a new layer of complexity to it, and every layer is still in the street and on the bill.

What it is made of
History
The palimpsest: the layers of generational transformation stacked over time, from the first gas works to the heat pumps and data centres of today.
Data map
Public data on the grid, street by street, and a translation of what that data means for the person living there.
Catalogue
The record behind the grid’s decisions: every dataset, statute, order and tariff the atlas uses, with its source, and every gap it could not fill. Each decision opens a map of who decided it, who argued, and under what rule.
Drawn from the data map’s own layers, simplified for drawing. Each layer’s source is in the data catalogue.
Why it exists

The decisions that shape a Boston household’s bill and street are public, but they are scattered: dockets in the Department of Public Utilities’ file room, rates in the companies’ tariff PDFs, permits and building records on two cities’ open-data portals, statutes in the session laws. Few residents know where to look, and fewer can join the pieces up.

The atlas gathers them in one place and connects each decision to the street and the bill it reaches. The aim is access: to know what has been decided, and to take part in what is still being decided while it is open.

What you can do with it

Look up an address, and the map answers five questions about it:

  1. What am I paying for?
  2. Who owns it? Who do I call?
  3. Where does it come from?
  4. What is changing near me?
  5. What will it cost? Who decided?

Read the history to see how those layers were laid down. Follow any figure back to the document it came from. See which decisions are still open and when the public can comment. And you can connect your own AI assistant to the atlas: add bostonenergyatlas.org/mcp as an MCP server, and it can answer your own questions about the grid with the atlas’s sources. How to connect → The whole catalogue is also published as open data (catalog.json, with its schema).

Explore history Explore the map Look up my address

About this atlas · Data catalogue · Harvard GSD, STU 1504 “Who Owns the Grid?”, Fall 2026