Why is China developing a PV power plant?

Attribution of the rapid PV expansion in China The rapid development of PV power plant construction in China is largely relied on the strong support and promotion from a comprehensive range of policies at both the central and local government levels. The PV policies have undergone different phases in recent years.

How big are PV power plants in China?

The total area of the PV power plants in China is about 897 km2, based on Dunnett's dataset. We manually modified this dataset with Google Earth's background to ensure that the PV samples are located inside the PV power plants.

Do PV power plants reduce vegetation in China?

The PV power plants in China are more likely to be installed in suitable natural conditions but with low power demand or in areas with high local energy demand. We also found that installing PV power plants will generally decrease the vegetation. Our dataset is conducive to policy management and environmental assessment.

Is there a geospatial dataset for PV power plants in China?

The proposed framework generated a geospatial PV dataset with 3712.1 km 2 in China by 2022. At present, there are two high-quality geospatial datasets of PV power plants that can be publicly available for China (Kruitwagen et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2022).

Which region will dominate the future PV power plants in China?

The expansion patterns indicate that the western and eastern regions of China will dominate the future PV installations. Therefore, the land occupation by PV power plants is a serious problem as most current PV power plants were situated on grasslands and croplands.

Where are PV power plants located in China?

The PV power plants in eastern and central China mainly established on croplands (24.6%) and the occupation of croplands presents a significant reduction of 48% from 2017 to 2022.