Global Photovoltaic Solar Panel Dataset from 2019 to 2022

Using Google Earth imagery and 2019-2022 Sentinel-2 datasets, we developed a two-stage classification framework to obtain the annual global dataset of solar photovoltaic panels at 20-meter resolution from 2019 to 2022.

To classify the global solar photovoltaic panels, we applied the global zoning method of IPCC AR6 WGI to define the main-zoning, and used 4 degree × 4 degree grids to create the sub-zoning. Then, we extracted the solar photovoltaic panels in each sub-zoning, and stored the result data in TIFF format.

The number of each file corresponds to the ID in the attribute table of the sub-zoning-ID file, and users can download and use the corresponding file based on the sub-zoning-ID. After the ID, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 respectively represent four years.

The folder of the annual global PV dataset is named after the year, and each file is named as "sub zoning ID_year".

The dataset has been published in Scientific Data, please cite: Li, A., Liu, L., Li, S. et al. Global photovoltaic solar panel dataset from 2019 to 2022. Sci Data 12, 637 (2025).  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04985-y