"Colleagues and I have now published in the journal Nature the first global inventory of large solar energy generating facilities. “Large” in this case refers to facilities that generate at least 10 kilowatts when the sun is at its peak (a typical small residential rooftop installation has a capacity of around 5 kilowatts).
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.
We searched almost half of Earth’s land surface area, filtering out remote areas far from human populations. In total we detected 68,661 solar facilities. 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. This is very close to the International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) estimate of 420 GW for the same period."
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