Ground-Mounted Photovoltaic Systems in Germany

This dataset is related to the paper "Creating a Dataset of Spatial Parameters of Ground-Mounted Photovoltaic Systems Utilising Orthophotos and the Segment Anything Model":

The rapid expansion of renewable energy sources poses significant challenges in reconciling energy development with competing interests. This underscores the necessity for precise spatial data to facilitate effective balancing, management, or evaluation of compliance with regulatory frameworks. This paper presents a zero-shot approach for extracting parameters of ground-mounted photovoltaic systems in Germany based on digital orthophotos. This allows for the accurate identification and delineation of essential spatial parameters, including the ground coverage ratio of photovoltaic modules, the row spacing between module rows, and their exact orientation. The results of this study are twofold. First, the developed technical pipeline successfully achieves high-quality segmentation of photovoltaic module rows, with over 71 % of the results demonstrating satisfactory to flawless segmentation. Second, the resulting dataset is made available for further analysis and can serve as a starting point for the development of additional AI models aimed at monitoring the dynamics of photovoltaic systems. This methodology not only supports compliance assessment but also enhances decision-making processes at the intersection of renewable energy development and competing interests, such as nature conservation.

In order to analyse the research questions posed in the journal article, three geospatial data products for ground-mounted photovoltaic systems (GMPV) in Germany have been created:

photovoltaic system footprints, including the GMPV system footprints as defined by Manske, 2025

photovoltaic module rows, comprising the photovoltaic module rows derived from the DOP

photovoltaic parks, representing the park polygons derived from OSM and the corresponding metadata per park, such as GCR or evaluation class

More details can be found in the provided release_notes.pdf and the linked ISPRS publication.