PDF | On Nov 1, 2023, Xiao-Ya Li and others published The promising future of developing large-scale PV solar farms in China: A three-stage framework for site selection | Find, read and cite
Additionally, some PV power plants are located in the industrially developed eastern coastal provinces of China, where precipitation is high, density population is high, and elevation is low. This distribution result
The results of this study indicated that China, as one of the fast-growing countries in the global south, shows outstanding potential for solar PV power station installation and generation potential.
The tool shows China ground mounted solar facilities occupied a surface of 2,467.7 km2 at the end of December 2020. Scientists led by the China Agricultural University have created a national-scale map and dataset of ground-mounted PV power stations in China.
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.
“In eastern China, PV power stations mainly locate in Anhui, Jiangsu, Shandong, Henan, Hubei and Jiangxi Province, while in southwestern China, Guizhou, Yunnan and Sichuan witnessed the most PV power stations.” Concluding the article, the academic group said it will release in the future new maps that are based on data from different years.
According to our dataset, China has a total of 2467.7 km 2 ground-mounted PV power stations in 2020. The top three largest provinces refer to Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and Qinghai, whose PV area ratio are 14.92%, 12.49% and 11.26%, respectively, with a total of nearly 40% of all the PV power stations of China.
With the world's highest cumulative and fastest built PV capacity, China needs to assess the environmental and social impacts of these established PV power plants. However, a comprehensive map regarding the PV power plants' locations and extent remains scarce on the country scale.
