Boston Energy Atlas · Greater Boston
The gap register

What cannot be known

Every atlas has holes. Almost none of them publish the holes, so the next person repeats the search. This page is the list: what is missing, what was actually attempted to find it, and what single action would close it.

Nothing is listed here that was not actually tried. A suspicion that data is missing is not a gap. Read together, these entries are the atlas's argument about what a city is allowed to know about its own grid — and they are the honest precondition for any roadmap, because a roadmap built on data that does not exist is a wish.

Severity
Why

What the register is for

Three of these gaps are closed by one person doing two minutes of work in a browser — a bot challenge clicked, a federal docket opened, a permissions email sent. They are listed beside the structural ones deliberately, because the difference between an absent fact and an inconvenient one is exactly what a register like this is supposed to make visible.

The rest are not so easy. Massachusetts publishes how much generation a distribution circuit can accept and never how much load. Twenty of twenty-five data centre buildings publish no power figure. The Commonwealth stopped printing per-company utility statistics after 1922 and never printed a peak-load table at all. Federal peak data merges New England with New York. Each is small on its own; together they describe a public record built to answer questions about supply, at a moment when every hard question is about demand.

If you can close one of these, the entry says what to do. If you find a gap this register is missing, that is a contribution — see the charter.