Solar Photovoltaic Panel Map China

Does China need a comprehensive map of PV power plants?

With the world's highest cumulative and fastest built PV capacity, China needs to assess the environmental and social impacts of these established PV power plants. However, a comprehensive map regarding the PV power plants' locations and extent remains scarce on the country scale.

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.

Which land is used for PV power stations in China?

Fig. 1 Examples of PV power stations in China. The land used for PV power stations includes gobi (left), grassland (top), water bodies (right), mountain land (bottom), etc. The objective of this study is to provide the first publicly released 10-m national map of ground-mounted PV power stations of China in 2020.

How big is China's ground-mounted solar power station?

The tool shows China ground mounted solar facilities occupied a surface of 2,467.7 km2 at the end of December 2020. Scientists led by the China Agricultural University have created a national-scale map and dataset of ground-mounted PV power stations in China.

Does China have a spatial map of PV power stations?

Although some researchers released several PV power station maps, most only met a medium resolution of 30 meters 9, 10. There thus still lacks a national map of China’s PV power stations with a higher spatial resolution (i.e., 10 meters) that could provide a global understanding of PV’s spatial deployment patterns.

How many PV power stations are there in China?

“According to our dataset, China has a total of 2,467.7 km2 ground-mounted PV power stations in 2020. The top three largest provinces refer to Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Qinghai, whose PV area ratios are 14.92%, 12.49%, and 11.26%, respectively, with a total of nearly 40% of all the PV power stations in China,” the academics explained.