![]() ![]() Stock for you / shutterstock The advantages of facility-level dataĬountry-level aggregates of our dataset are very close to IRENA’s country-level statistics, which are collected from questionnaires, country officials, and industry associations. Solar mixed with rice fields on reclaimed land in South Korea. Growth was led particularly by increases in India (184%), Turkey (143%), China (120%) and Japan (119%).įacilities 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. Our study shows solar PV generating capacity grew by a remarkable 81% between 20, the period for which we had timestamped imagery. This is very close to the International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) estimate of 420 GW for the same period. Using the area of these facilities, and controlling for the uncertainty in our machine learning system, we obtain a global estimate of 423 gigawatts of installed generating capacity at the end of 2018. 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. A map of all the large solar facilities detected up to 2018 (lighter colours = more recent) Kruitwagen et al, Nature ![]() We built a machine learning system to detect these facilities in satellite imagery and then deployed the system on over 550 terabytes of imagery using several human lifetimes of computing. (A typical small residential rooftop installation has a capacity of around 5 kilowatts). “Large” in this case refers to facilities that generate at least 10 kilowatts when the sun is at its peak. And there will be inevitable trade-offs between solar energy and other uses for the same land, including conservation and biodiversity, agriculture and food systems, and community and indigenous uses.Ĭolleagues and I have now published in the journal Nature the first global inventory of large solar energy generating facilities. ![]() Policy must also be designed to ensure solar energy reaches the furthest corners of the world and places where it is most needed. Solar is “intermittent”, since sunshine varies during the day and across seasons, so energy must be stored for when the sun doesn’t shine. The International Energy Agency projects that PV solar generating capacity must grow ten-fold by 2040 if we are to meet the dual tasks of alleviating global poverty and constraining warming to well below 2☌.Ĭritical challenges remain. An astonishing 82% decrease in the cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy since 2010 has given the world a fighting chance to build a zero-emissions energy system which might be less costly than the fossil-fuelled system it replaces.
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