Forget Cats, This Neural Network Spots Solar Panels

Stanford’s DeepSolar neural network analyzed satellite images to count U.S. solar installations—and there are a lot more than anybody thought

There are at least 1.47 million solar installations of varying sizes in the 48 contiguous U.S. states, from home rooftop panels to utility-owned solar power plants.

That’s the conclusion of DeepSolar, a machine learning algorithm developed by researchers at Stanford University that searches satellite images for solar panels. The count is higher than some previous estimates, like the OpenPV project’s count of 1.02 million installations.