“This highlights the need to carefully consider the impact that a ten-fold expansion of solar PV generating capacity will have in the coming decades on food systems, biodiversity, and lands used by vulnerable populations,” Kruitwagen explains. Related on Archinect: Idea of building solar panels over California’s canals floated by researchersįinally, the team was able to conclude that solar power plants are most often constructed in agricultural areas, followed by grasslands and deserts. The team was also able to use archived satellite imagery to estimate the installation dates for 30% of the facilities. Among them was the finding that solar PV generating capacity grew by 81% between 20, with particularly strong growth in India (184%), Turkey (142%), and China (120%). The team used the map to generate an array of insightful findings. Image: Kruitwagen et al, Nature via The Conversation Cropland (light brown) was easily the most common. The authors compared the locations of the solar facilities to data on land use, to find out what was there before. ranged in size from sprawling gigawatt-scale desert installations in Chile, South Africa, India and north-west China, through to commercial and industrial rooftop installations in California and Germany, rural patchwork installations in North Carolina and England, and urban patchwork installations in South Korea and Japan.”

“In total, we detected 68,661 solar facilities. “We searched almost half of Earth’s land surface area, filtering out remote areas far from human populations,” explained research co-author Lucas Kruitwagen in an article on The Conversation. The researchers also refined their search to areas of likely human habitation. To streamline their results, the researchers limited their search to solar facilities which generate at least 10 kilowatts during peak operation: approximately twice as much as a small residential rooftop system. The map was made possible by the construction of a machine learning system which could detect solar facilities in satellite imagery a system that the researchers scaled to a planet-wide search using 550 terabytes of imagery. A map of all the large solar facilities detected up to 2018 (lighter colors = more recent). The findings were published in the journal Natureby researchers from the University of Oxford in the UK, Descartes Labs Inc in San Francisco, and the World Resources Institute in Washington DC. The team behind the map sees it as an opportunity to consider the future trajectory of solar expansion and to inform decisions on what land uses can be best supplanted by solar farms by looking at historic trends. Researchers from the United States and United Kingdom have used machine learning to map every large solar plant in the world.

Mapped every large solar plant earth