The national-scale PV power station map 40 in this study is provided for entire China in 2020 with a fine spatial resolution of 10 meters, which is the highest resolution recorded among all the publicly released PV datasets. The data format is GeoTIFF while the spatial reference is WGS-84.
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.
Large-scale solar PV power plants mostly tend to locate on the areas with rich vegetation cover and close to grid lines. Spatial predictions of solar photovoltaics installations probability using three ML models presented a consistent distribution pattern.
Meanwhile, only two kinds of values are in the PV power station map, where 0 stands for the non-PV regions while 1 represents the PV power stations. In addition, the provided PV dataset could be loaded into GIS software such as ArcGIS and QIS for data visualization and spatial analysis.
The data format is GeoTIFF while the spatial reference is WGS-84. Meanwhile, only two kinds of values are in the PV power station map, where 0 stands for the non-PV regions while 1 represents the 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.