Aerial photo of Suofengying Power Plant

How big are PV power plants in China?

The total area of the PV power plants in China is about 897 km2, based on Dunnett's dataset. We manually modified this dataset with Google Earth's background to ensure that the PV samples are located inside the PV power plants.

Where are PV power plants located in China?

Eventually, we established a map of PV power plants in China by 2020, covering a total area of 2917 km2. We found that most PV power plants were situated on cropland, followed by barren land and grassland, based on the derived national PV map. In addition, the installation of PV power plants has generally decreased the vegetation cover.

Do PV power plants reduce vegetation in China?

The PV power plants in China are more likely to be installed in suitable natural conditions but with low power demand or in areas with high local energy demand. We also found that installing PV power plants will generally decrease the vegetation. Our dataset is conducive to policy management and environmental assessment.

Do misclassified PV power plants still exist in China?

A large number of misclassified PV power plants due to commission errors in the machine learning step still exists in China. After transferring the pixel clusters to objects of vectors, we have spent dozens of hours on visual interpretation work to filter the misclassification regions with commission error.

How do mountainous areas affect PV power plants?

In particular, these PV power plants situated in mountainous areas typically have unique installation spacing and installation angles for their solar panels. Additionally, the mountainous terrain also impacts the reflectance of the PV power plants (Wen et al., 2018).

Can machine learning map PV power plants across China?

This study developed a workflow, combining machine learning and visual interpretation methods with big satellite data, to map PV power plants across China. We applied a pixel-based random forest (RF) model to classify the PV power plants from composite images in 2020 with a 30 m spatial resolution on the Google Earth Engine (GEE).