United States Large-Scale Solar Photovoltaic Database (ver. 1.0, November 2023)

Over 4,400 large scale commercial solar facilities are in operation in the United States as of December, 2021, representing over 60 gigawatts of electric power capacity; of these, over 3,900 are ground-mounted with capacities of 1MW or more, specified as large scale solar photovoltaic (LSPV) facilities. LSPV ground-mounted installations continue to grow, with over 400 projects coming online in 2021 alone. Currently, a comprehensive, publicly available georectified data describing the locations and spatial footprints of these facilities does not exist. Analysts from the US Geological Survey and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory collaborated to develop and release the United States Large Scale Solar Photovoltaic Database (USPVDB). This effort built from the expertise gained while developing the regularly updated United States Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB). Starting from Energy Information Administration (EIA) data, locations of LSPV facilities were visually verified using high-resolution aerial imagery; a polygon was drawn around the extent of facility panel arrays, and facility attributes were appended. Quality assurance and control were achieved via team peer review, and comparing the USPVDB to other datasets of US PV. The data are available in several formats, including an interactive web application, comma-separated value spreadsheet (CSV), application programming interface (API), and a shapefile. The data are available for use by academic researchers, engineers and developers from PV companies, government agencies, planners, educators, and the general public.