Global Solar Siting from Geospatial Embeddings

Abdullah Rehman, Quentin Paletta, Rui Song

Global solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity is rapidly growing, helping decrease our emissions and dependence on fossil fuels. However, optimally siting a solar plant remains challenging, requiring anticipation of geographical, urban, and infrastructure needs. Current methods rely on multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) using hand-picked geophysical layers and solar-resource products, however these strategies are not geographically transferable and do not capture the practical requirements of solar sites. We use geospatial embeddings, dense vectors representing geophysical properties of a location, to analyse 38,591 existing solar sites and the land they were built on to learn the latent solar suitability signal. We assess a set of linear and non-linear models and select a soft-voting ensemble of a random forest and a multilayer perceptron (RF+MLP ensemble), chosen for accuracy and large scale deployability. Validated against future installations in thirteen countries, the ensemble separates existing solar sites from random land with a median ROC-AUC of 0.90. Compared with published MCDA strategies, the ensemble increases ROC-AUC by 0.06-0.30 in every country. The ranking also…