This map was created to demonstrate the results of research by Christopher Arderne, Conrad Zorn, Claire Nicolas, and Elco Koks:
Predictive mapping of the global power system using open data
This is based on gridfinder, an open source tool for predicting the location of electricity network lines, using night-time lights satellite imagery and OpenStreetMap data. Original work by Rohrer and team at Facebook here
All data is available to download. For more background information, please see this blog post. This site is purely a visualization of the data. Please read the paper, explore the dataset, or get in touch with the authors to find out more.