The place where photovoltaic panels are installed in Yili

How many ground-mounted PV power stations are there in China?

According to our dataset, China has a total of 2467.7 km 2 ground-mounted PV power stations in 2020. The top three largest provinces refer to Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Qinghai, whose PV area ratio are 14.92%, 12.49% and 11.26%, respectively, with a total of nearly 40% of all the PV power stations of China.

Are roads and industrial roof tops misclassified into PV power stations?

Other land cover types especially the roads and industrial roof tops may be misclassified into PV power stations. The drawback of this study is that roads and other facilities have not been classified, leading to a risk of underestimating the areas of PV power stations.

What is the slope of a PV power station?

To further investigate this issue, we also calculated the histogram of land slope in each direction (Fig. 4b). It depicts that most of the PV power stations in the northern parts (i.e., north, northeast, and northwest) have a slope of below 5°, i.e., most lying on the flatten ground instead of the nightside of the mountain.

Can a random forest classifier detect solar photovoltaic arrays in aerial imagery?

Malof, J. M. et al. Image features for pixel-wise detection of solar photovoltaic arrays in aerial imagery using a random forest classifier. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Renewable Energy Research and Applications (ICRERA). 799–803 (IEEE, 2016).

What is remote sensing derived dataset for large-scale photovoltaic power stations in China?

We provide a remote sensing derived dataset for large-scale ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV) power stations in China of 2020, which has high spatial resolution of 10 meters. The dataset is based on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud computing platform via random forest classifier and active learning strategy.

Does post-processing lead to missing out small ground-mounted PV stations?

Since we are mainly focused on the ground mounted PV stations, whose areas are much more than 900 m 2 while even the small PV stations in China are about 30,000 m 2. Therefore, the post-processing step would not lead to the possibility of missing out these small ground-mounted PV stations.