Global Solar Siting from Geospatial Embeddings

arXiv:2611.08831v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.