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Comment by gnfargbl | Hacker News Reader

This is the first time I have seen the Open Infrastructure Map, and I was particularly struck by the global solar distribution: https://openinframap.org/#2/49.5/-53.93/S. Not what I expected, at all.

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There are many solar plants not mapped due to lack of high quality, up-to-date aerial/satellite imagery, or volunteers. Germany is country mapped best, not necessarily having significant share of solar.

Might also be how it’s displayed. Germany has quite a bit of solar but its less concentrated in giant solar parks and the country is smaller than US, China, or India.

So for example US has multiple solar farms over 500MW and several over 200MW but none of Germany’s solar farms are over 200MW and only 4 are over 100MW.

A quick google tells me that as of 2021, the US had ~23GW of installed solar generating capacity, and Germany had ~59GW. As the US has roughly 4x the population of Germany, that means that Germany has roughly 12x the amount of installed solar capacity per capita.

Wikipedia gives different 2021 numbers including (percentage of global solar installed) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country

  China: 306,973 MW (35.8%)
  United States: 95,209 MW (11.1%)
  Japan: 74,191 MW (8.7%)
  Germany: 58,461 MW (6.8%)
  India: 56,951 MW (6.6%)

With 2020 numbers for percentage of electricity generation by solar: Germany 9.7%, Japan 8.3%, India 6.5%, China 6.2%, and US 3.4%

In addition, the US govt says [0] this year should have added 46,100 MW to the total. Electrek, if they are accurate, predicted an additional 5,600 MW on residential rooftops in 2022 [1].

[0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818

[1] https://electrek.co/2022/08/29/american-residential-solar/

Interesting. Looks like in my haste I may have been comparing Germany's total installed capacity with the US's newly installed capacity.

I wonder whether this is due to unreliable data. I am not sure where this is sourced from since tracking all the solar installations seems like a lot of work.

Yeah, given how abruptly the density of the data shifts based on borders, I strongly suspect there is a data quality problem. The available information is interesting, but comparisons pretty meaningless.

I heard yesterday (from someone who works for a place that determines solar capacity from satellite photos) that the UK has between 10 and 16GW solar capacity. That's the official figure. No-one really knows (hence his company)

On the power layer, it seems the national grid is generally 400kV nominal, with regional sub-grids at 132kV and then towns with 33kV & 11kV. Is that 3x 11kV phases = 33kV? And then 33kV = 1/4 tap of the 132kV? '400kV' is actually 396kV?

Wow. Really emphasises the opportunity for more solar in most of the world!

Assuming the map reflects the territory, obviously. Which is a rather huge assumption.

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