Modern graphics cards enable applications to process
big amounts of graphical data faster than CPUs,
allowing high-volume parallelizable data to be visualized
in real-time. In this paper, we present an approach
to enable a power grid planning ComputerAided-Design
application to use this processing power
to visualize electrical distribution grids in the fastest
possible way. Specifically, the GPU has been programmed
using Vertex Shaders in order to generate
wide lines representing the power lines carrying
a given power load. Furthermore, this kind of
shaders was also used to translate the coordinates of
the power grid from the geographic to the graphic domain,
thus offloading this work from the CPU. As a
result, the aforesaid application became able to render
the visualization of power grids much faster and
to offer highly responsive interactions with them.