Satellite map of solar power plants

Where are solar power plants located in China?

Gansu Province, located in the northwest of China, has abundant solar and wind energy resources, and is one of the earliest provinces to study and develop solar power plants in China. The installed PV capacity increased to 5060 MW in 2014, ranking first in China (Tian and Xue, 2016).

Does China have a spatial map of PV power stations?

Although some researchers released several PV power station maps, most only met a medium resolution of 30 meters 9, 10. There thus still lacks a national map of China’s PV power stations with a higher spatial resolution (i.e., 10 meters) that could provide a global understanding of PV’s spatial deployment patterns.

Which satellite imagery should I use for solar panels?

The first critical choice was what satellite imagery to use. We chose to work with two sources: Airbus SPOT and Sentinel 2. Airbus SPOT provides high spatial resolution 4-band imagery at 1.5m per pixel, which is sufficient to see the pattern of solar panels laid out in arrays.

What data did we use to map solar facilities?

We used extensive data available on Open Street Maps (OSM) as a starting point. The OSM data was primarily from North America and Europe but was lacking in Asia. To ensure we were able to map solar facilities worldwide, we also hand-labeled a significant number of facilities in China and other Asian countries.

Where are solar power plants most common?

Cropland (light brown) was easily the most common. Kruitwagen et al, Nature Knowing where a facility is also allows us to study the unintended consequences of the growth of solar energy generation. In our study, we found that solar power plants are most often in agricultural areas, followed by grasslands and deserts.

Can visual interpretation be used to map PV solar power plants?

Visual interpretation has been widely used in previous studies for mapping PV solar power plants; however, it is often labor-intensive, time consuming, and difficult to be extended to large regions at non-acquisition times (Wang et al. 2020a, 2020b).