The Widely Used U.S. Large-Scale Solar Photovoltaics Database has been Significantly Updated

Berkeley Lab, in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), recently released a significant update to the United States Large-Scale Solar Photovoltaic Database (USPVDB). The USPVDB is a detailed and comprehensive dataset of ground-mounted large-scale solar (LSS) photovoltaic energy facilities in the United States, including locations and a number of other attributes.

In USPVDB V.2.0, nearly 500 facilities have been added to the already substantial dataset. The dataset now comprises 4,185 LSS ground-mounted facilities with capacities greater than 1 MWdc in operation across 47 states and Washington, D.C. through August 2023. Following an initial flurry of 100,000 visits in the month following its release, the USPVDB website has been visited by approximately 20,000 users each month. The site has been visited over 250,000 to date and over 2,500 users have downloaded the data.

The data can be downloaded in multiple formats – geospatial (shapefile, GeoJSON) and tabular (csv) versions – and can be downloaded as an entire dataset or in parts via an application protocol interface (API). Further, an interactive web viewerenables a number of unique opportunities for data exploration and visualization, such as deployment over time and by project sizes. Via the online viewer, users are able to perform a number of useful and intuitive searches. The viewer allows users to filter data based on facility attributes, including capacity, type, and initial year of operation. Accompanying the release of V.2.0, viewer functionality has been improved and now provides the option to view and summarize only the LSS facilities of a particular state.

The team anticipates providing another update to USPVDB in early 2025.

Berkeley Lab | emp.lbl.gov