Installation of photovoltaic panels near Inner Mongolia

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.

Where are PV power stations located in China?

It should also be noted that with the rapid development of China’s PV industry, increasingly more eastern provinces built large-scale PV power stations, including Jiangsu, Anhui and Shandong Province. Areas of PV power stations for each province of 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.

Is PV power a problem in China?

Meanwhile, PV power has gradually raised huge concerns in China. According to statistics 7, the installed capacity of PV power in China was only 100 MW in 2007, but grew rapidly to 205,000 MW in 2019, with an average growth of 17,075 MW per year.

What land is used for PV power stations?

The land used for PV power stations includes gobi (left), grassland (top), water bodies (right), mountain land (bottom), etc. As for PV power station mapping, previous methods mainly focused on field survey and visual inspection, where manual annotation was performed to delineate the locations or boundaries based on the remote sensing imagery.

Should PV power stations be monitored?

The monitoring of PV power stations would be meaningful for both researchers and government officials. As mentioned above, the last decade has witnessed the widespread of PV power stations in China, where much previous gobi, grassland, water bodies and mountain land have now been covered by newly-built PV power stations (Fig. 1).