Verifying Rapid Increasing of Mega-Solar PV Power Plants in Japan by Applying a CNN-Based Classification Method to Satellite Images

Since the huge earth quake in 2011 in Japan, the Japanese government has strongly encouraged growth of renewable energy use. As a result, even we focus on only mega-solar photovoltaic (PV) power plants (> 1,000 kW), the amount of the power generation significantly increased. Because such rapid increasing of the PV power plants changes land use widely, verification of the spreading of the PV power plants should be essential for assessing economic/environmental issues. In this study, to verify the increasing of the PV power plants based on observations, we applied a method that can detect the PV power plants efficiently with a convolutional neural network to Landsat-8 images. From the detection, we successfully identified the increasing of the area of the PV power plants quantitatively at the same time identifying the location of each PV power plant in many prefectures in the capital region of Japan.