"A Solar Power Plant Site Screening Pipeline from Open Satellite Data and Physics Based Reanalysis"

"Selecting suitable land is a critical step in developing large-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) plants. Poor site selection can lead to low energy yield, high construction costs, and long-term operational issues. This paper presents \\textbf{Solar Sentinel}, a satellite-based framework that evaluates the suitability of a location for solar power deployment using open-source Earth observation data.} \\textbf{The proposed system combines multiple environmental indicators derived from satellite datasets, including vegetation cover, terrain elevation and slope, soil moisture conditions, and long-term solar irradiance. These parameters are extracted for user-defined geographic coordinates and processed through a unified geospatial pipeline to generate an interpretable suitability profile for each location.}\\textbf{Unlike traditional approaches that rely on regional averages or costly ground surveys, Solar Sentinel enables rapid, location-specific assessment using freely available satellite data. The framework is lightweight, scalable, and designed for early-stage feasibility analysis of solar projects. This work demonstrates how satellite data fusion can support informed decision-making for solar site selection and lays the groundwork for future extensions involving economic analysis and automated suitability scoring."