Solar power is a clean source of energy. To replace conventional power sources, solar power generation must be scaled. This is being done by creating large solar photovoltaic parks. Some of the large parks span up to thousands of acres and are equipped with millions of solar panels. This information can serve government, policy makers, international organizations, companies, and researchers in various ways.
Traditional ways of obtaining information on solar photovoltaic parks, such as surveys and on-site visits, are time consuming and error prone. Deep learning models are highly capable of learning complex semantics and can produce superior results. Use this deep learning model to automate the process and reduce the time and effort required for solar park classification.
License requirements
To complete this workflow, the following are the license requirements:
- ArcGIS Desktop—ArcGIS Image Analyst extension for ArcGIS Pro
- ArcGIS Enterprise—ArcGIS Image Server with raster analytics configured
- ArcGIS Online—ArcGIS Pro or Professional Plus user type
Model details
This model has the following characteristics:
- Input—Sentinel-2 L2A BOA Reflectance product in the form of a Raster, mosaic dataset, or image service.
- Output—A classified raster with two classes, Solar Parks and other.
- Compute—This workflow is compute intensive, and a GPU with compute capability of 6.0 or higher is recommended.
- Applicable geographies—This model is expected to work well globally.
- Architecture—This model uses the U-net model architecture implemented in ArcGIS API for Python.
- Accuracy metrics—This model has an average precision score of 0.99.
Access and download the model
Download the Solar Photovoltaic Park Classification—Global (Sentinel-2) pretrained model from ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. Alternatively, access the model directly from ArcGIS Pro, or consume it in ArcGIS Image for ArcGIS Online.
- Browse to ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.
- Sign in with your ArcGIS Online credentials.
- Search for Solar Photovoltaic Park Classification—Global (Sentinel-2) and open the item page from the search results.
- Click the Download button to download the model.
You can use the downloaded .dlpk file directly in ArcGIS Pro, or upload and use it in ArcGIS Enterprise. Additionally, you can fine-tune the pretrained model if necessary.
Release notes
The following are the release notes:
| Date | Description |
|---|---|
| May 2022 |
|