Avian’s Blog

Today is Open Data Day. Unfortunately our little local group didn't have an organized event this year, so I thought I would contribute by releasing a little project of my own.

During the glaze ice disaster this month I've been collecting data from Elektro Ljubljana to share with family and friends living on the affected areas and keep them up-to-date with the situation.

Elektro Ljubljana is one of the larger distributors of electrical energy in Slovenia. It maintains the distribution infrastructure in the central and southern regions of the country, including our capital city Ljubljana. They cover 36% of the population according to their website. From the beginning of the crisis they have been publishing reports on the state of their infrastructure several times per day. They continue to do so, since emergency crews still haven't been able to reach some damaged parts of their network.

Image by Elektro Ljubljana d.d.

I've downloaded these hand-written reports and converted them into machine-readable JSON format through a hastily written Python scraper (not proud of parsing HTML with regular expressions, but I've been in a hurry). The data starts at the first report on January 31 and continues to the latest report published today.

You can get the extracted data on GitHub as well as scripts that have been used to extract it:

$ git clone https://github.com/avian2/elektro-ljubljana-outages.git

The following graph shows the number of clients without electrical power (red), affected transformer stations in the whole network (green) and affected transformer stations in the Logatec region (where, in addition to my family, also the Log-a-tec network resides):

The animation below shows the development of the outages over time. The color of each region shows the number of transformer stations without power. It would be better if the percentage of affected stations would be shown, but unfortunately I do not have data on the total number of stations in each region.

(Click to watch Elektro Ljubljana - transformer station failures due to glaze ice video)