EarthPV

Free and open mapping of photovoltaics around the Earth!
Including Capacity, Growth and Orientation Systems Above 10 kWp

Documentation  ·  Country atlases  ·  Pretrained model  ·  Set up a new country  ·  Experiments  ·  Discord

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[!WARNING] Active development. EarthPV is research software in the alpha stage that relies heavily on content generated by LLM. Its detectors, calibration and headline numbers are still being tested and revised, not settled.

Many countries do not know how much solar power sits on their roofs, or where. EarthPV answers that from space with free data: it detects PV arrays in Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, turns them into capacity estimates, and hands each detection to OpenStreetMap mappers to verify. What they confirm trains the next model. Built only on open models and global datasets, it works for any country.

Evidence atlas

Each country gets an interactive evidence atlas: hand-mapped OpenStreetMap installations plus the model's own detections, per 0.1° cell, with a 90% range on the headline figure. Atlases are tiered by calibration and checking (what each level needs); mapping calibration areas and checking the mapping leads is how an atlas moves up, so maps a calibration area.

Tier	Country	What the atlas rests on
Gold	none yet	Installations above and below 400 m², the small ones calibrated on areas mapped panel by panel, with the rooftop classifier checked by people on randomly drawn cells and on its score for every building
Silver	Pakistan	400 m² and up, checked against local ground truth, with about a third of the mapping leads and of the very large outlines checked and mapped in OpenStreetMap, and the model retrained on them; Pakistan also has a calibrated estimate below 400 m², not yet checked by people
Bronze, calibrated as Silver	Germany, France, Yemen	400 m² and up, checked against the national register (Germany, France) and hand-mapped communes (France); Yemen's small solar-irrigation arrays calibrated on mapped farm areas. Germany also shows a small-installation estimate fitted to its register, not yet validated. Bronze until more of their leads are mapped in OpenStreetMap to localize the model
Bronze	Belgium, Denmark, Egypt, India, Italy, Luxembourg, Morocco, Namibia, Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, , , , , , ,

How it works

At Sentinel-2's 10 m resolution a large array has a shape you can trace and a small one does not, so EarthPV runs two instruments and combines them.

• Segmentation, the fine-tuned TerraMind, outlines arrays above roughly 400 m². Every detection becomes a ranked mapping lead, and it is the only instrument for ground-mounted solar at any size.
• roofclf asks a smaller question of every building: does this roof carry PV? A 100 m² array is a handful of mixed pixels, too few to outline but often enough to classify. It is calibrated on areas where every installation was mapped by hand.

earthpv atlas combines both with the hand-mapped OpenStreetMap layer into a Best estimate, with overlaps removed and a 90% range attached. A country with neither hand-mapped calibration areas nor a register gets the segmentation half only.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗