American Solar Farms

Summary

Last week, Jake Stid, a postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University, announced Ground-Mounted Solar Energy in the United States (GM-SEUS). This is a 15K-array, 2.9M-panel dataset of utility and commercial-grade solar farms across the lower 48 states plus the District of Columbia. This dataset was constructed by a team of researchers including alumni from NOAA, NASA and the USGS. Below is a heatmap of the assets catalogued in this dataset. GM-SEUS is broken up into two datasets, one for arrays and another panels. Below you can see a solar farm with the array outlined in red and the panels covered purple. In this post, I'll explore GM-SEUS's Solar Farm dataset. My Workstation I'm using a 5.7 GHz AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU. It has 16 cores and 32 threads and 1.2 MB of L1, 16 MB of L2 and 64 MB of L3 cache. It has a liquid cooler attached and is housed in a spacious, full-sized Cooler Master HAF 700 computer case. The system has 96 GB of DDR5 RAM clocked at 4,800 MT/s and a 5th-generation, Crucial T700 4 TB NVMe M.2 SSD which can read at speeds up to 12,400 MB/s. There is a heatsink on the SSD to help keep its temperature down. This is my system's C drive. The system is powered by a 1,200-watt, fully modular Corsair Power Supply and is sat on an ASRock X870E Nova 90 Motherboard. I'm running Ubuntu 24 LTS via Microsoft's Ubuntu for Windows on Windows 11 Pro. In case you're wondering why I don't run a Linux-based desktop as my primary work environment, I'm still using an Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU which has better driver support on Windows and ArcGIS Pro only supports Windows natively. Installing Prerequisites I'll use GDAL 3.9.3 and a few other tools to help analyse the data in this post. $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable $ sudo apt update $ sudo apt install \ gdal-bin \ jq I'll use DuckDB v1.4.1, along with its H3, JSON, Lindel, Parquet and Spatial extensions, in this post. $ cd ~ $ wget -c https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb/releases/download...