Infotécnica: public data from Chile's electrical system for AI agents

Day 46 / 60

Not many days left to finish my challenge. This is when things get serious.

I knew the Infotécnica work was going to take me a while. Infotécnica is one of those things you don't appreciate until you actually use it.

Infotécnica website 2026

Infotécnica is incredible. I find it amazing that there exists an open website where anyone who can read electrical diagrams and understands electricity can access absolutely everything about the Chilean electrical system. Transformer parameters, single-line diagrams, protection data, impedances, transformation ratios. All there, free, public. In many countries this is restricted or possibly confidential information.

Chile is transparent with its electrical information and that's something that should be valued more. (I'm deeply appreciating it while programming this agent).

The agent fetches data from Infotécnica

One of the capabilities I'm building for D.N. is for the agent to go directly to Infotécnica, navigate the site, find a specific substation and extract all available technical information: equipment parameters, bus configurations, transformer data, protections. Everything an engineer needs for a study.

D.N. agent in action fetching data from Infotécnica

The agent operates as a ReAct loop: observe the page, decide what to do, execute the action, observe the result and repeat. Sounds simple. It's not.

Infotécnica's UX doesn't convince me

The UX doesn't fully convince me. The agent has to click on places that I honestly don't understand why they're placed there. Modals open, and then inside those modals more information is displayed. I find it a bit confusing.

Reading electrical diagrams is incredibly difficult

This is the point that has surprised me the most. I knew single-line diagrams were complex, but I didn't grasp how difficult it would be to interpret them with AI.

Each substation has a different layout from the next. Each one is its own world. There are different bus configurations, equipment layouts change, the presentation of diagrams and delivery format differs. The agent has to decipher a massive visual document where position, connections and symbols have contextual meaning.

It often gets it wrong. It hasn't been able to correctly tell me how many available positions there are at S/E Cerro Navia or S/E Carrera Pinto.

It's proving harder than I expected. The diagrams are huge, SEN substations are a reflection of decades of accumulated engineering decisions, expansions upon expansions, technologies from different eras coexisting in the same diagram. The agent has to navigate all of that.

On top of all that, I still need to consider projects in the interconnection process. I think for now the Infotécnica tool is useful and will be excellent when I start doing real studies on the actual system, it works as an entry point to find available connection points but in some cases I need to go to open access to complement information. (Next task: Go to open access)

Data rejected by the CEN

Something I found notable: some data is rejected by the CEN. For example, the S/E Cerro Navia. Anyone who knows a bit about Santiago's electrical system knows it's an old substation, operated by Transelec for decades. The commissioning date according to Infotécnica is 2017. Incredibly, in Infotécnica it's marked as rejected data.

I prefer a thousand times a system that tells me "heads up, this data might be incorrect" over one that presents wrong information with certainty. In fact, I found this article where the SEC asks the CEN to complete and verify Infotécnica's missing data, so it's being actively addressed.

For the agent this is valuable. It can take those data quality signals and propagate them to the reports it generates.

Ideas

While building the agent that scrapes the Infotécnica site, certain ideas came to mind;

What would be truly transformative is indexing all Infotécnica data to enable semantic searches. Imagine asking the agent "what are all the SEN substations with power transformers over 100 MVA that have SEL protections?" and having it respond by cross-referencing data from multiple technical sheets in seconds.

Infotécnica around the world

Does something similar exist in other countries? Yes, but the level of public access varies greatly.

I did a quick bit of research and this is what I found:

Colombia has PARATEC through XM, which is probably the most comparable system. Brazil has ONS publishing technical data from the interconnected system. Spain uses e-SIOS through Red Eléctrica. In the United States there's no centralized equivalent, instead each ISO/RTO ( CAISO, PJM, ERCOT) publishes its own grid models. The UK has the National Grid ESO Data Portal.

The key difference is that in many countries detailed technical information is considered restricted for security or commercial confidentiality reasons. Chile is quite transparent by comparison. For what I'm building with D.N. this is a huge advantage. In other markets, automating the retrieval of this data would be considerably harder.

Closing

A hug to the people who maintain Infotécnica and the CEN if they ever read this. Thank you for maintaining this incredible platform