Photovoltaic panels of Zhalainuoer Lingquan Power Plant

Are PV power plants expanding in different regions of China?

The uncovered expansion patterns of PV power plants in different regions of China hold significant value for understanding PV development and its land occupation in both space and time.

Are PV power plants occupying cropland and grassland?

The expansion patterns of PV power plants are explored in both space and time. The occupation of cropland and grassland by PV power plants has a declining trend. China's rapid deployment of solar photovoltaic (PV) power plants has positioned it as the global leader in cumulative installed capacity.

How big is China's photovoltaic capacity in 2020?

In 2020, China's newly installed grid-connected photovoltaic capacity reached 48.2GW, a year-on-year increase of 60.1%, of which the installed capacity of centralized photovoltaic power plants was 32.7GW, a year-on-year increase of 82.68%; the installed capacity of distributed photovoltaic power plants was 15.5GW, a year-on-year increase of 27.04%.

Are PV areas overestimated in Zhang's study?

However, as the PV polygons from Zhang's study included several non-PV pixels around PV polygons (Fig. 10 a and b), resulting in the overestimation of PV areas in their study. Table 2. Comparison of PV solar power plant maps between our study and Zhang's study.

Where are PV power plants located in China?

The PV power plants in eastern and central China mainly established on croplands (24.6%) and the occupation of croplands presents a significant reduction of 48% from 2017 to 2022.

Is there a geospatial dataset for PV power plants in China?

The proposed framework generated a geospatial PV dataset with 3712.1 km 2 in China by 2022. At present, there are two high-quality geospatial datasets of PV power plants that can be publicly available for China (Kruitwagen et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2022).