GRID · SOLAR FARMS
The Renewables Build-Out, in the Sun
The companion to wind: solar is the other half of the clean-energy build-out, and this layer maps where the utility-scale fleet sits — drawn as solar-gold suns sized by capacity, from community plants up to the great desert parks like Bhadla and Pavagada in India and the Gulf mega-projects. One honest caveat up front: OpenStreetMap holds around 100,261 solar plants, but only about 16%carry a capacity figure — most of the rest are small rooftop arrays. So this maps the ~16,138 plants where size is actually known, the utility-scale fleet. The biggest anchor the world view and the rest reveal as you zoom in; tap a sun for its name and capacity.
The biggest parks
Where wind’s giants are offshore, solar’s are in the desert— vast arrays on cheap, sun-drenched land. India’s Bhadla and Pavagada, the Gulf mega-projects (Dubai’s Mohammed bin Rashid, Abu Dhabi’s Al Dhafra), Egypt’s Benban and China’s Tengger lead the world. These are the largest namedparks in the data; because OSM’s solar capacity tags are sparse and uneven, the list is filtered to keep the genuine record-holders and drop obvious over-tags.
Where the parks are mapped
As with wind, this is a map of where solar is mapped with a capacity figure, not where solar power is — and for solar the gap is even wider. Europe and North America dominate the tagged fleet because OpenStreetMap is mapped most thoroughly there, while China — which has built more solar than any other country on Earth — and India show only a fraction of their real capacity here. The desert giants are present, but the long tail of Chinese and Indian utility solar is largely untagged. Read the counts as a guide to the mapping, not a league table of solar power.
About this data
Every park comes from OpenStreetMap (power=plant with plant:source=solar, via the Overpass API, ODbL). OSM holds about 100,261 solar plants, but capacity (the plant:output:electricity tag) is recorded on only ~16% — and the untagged majority are mostly small rooftop and community arrays. Drawing tens of thousands of sizeless dots would say nothing, so this layer maps the ~16,138 plants that carry a capacity figure: the utility-scale fleet, each sized by that capacity on a square-root scale and capped at 2.5 GW. Solar capacity tags are also noisy, so the build drops anything over 3.5 GW outright (a 3.75 TW “plant” is a typo, not a power station), and the biggest-parks list is filtered region-by-region so a mis-tagged European entry can’t outrank the real desert giants. Operators are never shown. Coverage follows OSM mapping completeness, which leans hard to Europe and North America, so this is the publicly mapped fleet, not a census. Snapshot taken 2026-06-26.