Texas' PV Atlas

Best estimate: 46,206 MWp, with a 90% range of 41,310–66,432 MWp. The range covers two measured sources of uncertainty, not everything that could move this number. Below: what is inside the range, and what is not.

Inside the range:

• The two area-to-power constants. Panel area on a roof converts at about 0.18 kWp per m², the rating of a typical module; the outline of a ground-mounted park converts at about 0.05 kWp per m², measured on parks whose capacity is known. Each is varied over its own range (90%: 0.15–0.21 and 0.035–0.075 kWp per m²).
• How reliable the segmentation model's detections are. How often its detections turn out to be real, and how many mapped arrays it misses, were measured size class by size class against mapped installations. Those measurements have their own sampling error, which is drawn into the range.

Outside the range, and not something more arithmetic can add back:

• No area of this country has been exhaustively mapped by hand to check these numbers against. The detectors' measured accuracy is carried over from the countries where it was measured, and how well it transfers here has not itself been measured. That is a different kind of uncertainty from the range above, and no amount of arithmetic converts one into the other.
• This page maps Texas's solar parks, not its rooftops. No area of Texas has been mapped panel by panel, so there is nothing to calibrate a per-building rooftop classifier against here. Everything on the map is either hand-mapped in OpenStreetMap or an array the segmentation model outlined directly, which in practice means installations of roughly 400 m² and up, and the model finds almost no rooftop arrays. The household and business systems the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) counts as small-scale are below that size and are missing from Best.
• Panel capacity, not inverter capacity. This page counts panels (MWp, DC). EIA's figures further down count inverter capacity (AC), and Texas's parks carry roughly 29% more panel than inverter capacity where EIA reports both, so read Best against EIA's figures with that in mind.
• Most of this page is mapped park outlines, priced by area. OpenStreetMap mappers have outlined most of Texas's solar parks as whole sites. A site's capacity is its area times a fixed density of panels per square metre of site, measured on parks elsewhere; in the Texas parks where EIA reports panel capacity, the mapped site holds close to that density, but a single park can differ from it either way.
• Some mapped parks are not yet in EIA's inventory. Several large parks mapped in OpenStreetMap lie far from any plant EIA lists as operating in September 2026. The model finds panels over nearly all of them in this summer's imagery, so they are counted; they are probably newer than EIA's inventory, or EIA places them elsewhere.
• Very large model outlines count only once checked. A model outline above 100,000 m² counts only when it is mapped or a person has judged it solar, and Texas has hundreds of them waiting, as well as large model outlines below that size. Few of them lie near a plant in EIA's inventory, so most are probably not solar. Mapping a real park brings it into the verified layer.
• Imagery covers where people live, plus every mapped solar site. Map cells were imaged if they hold at least 1,000 buildings or any hand-mapped solar installation. A park built on empty land that nobody has mapped yet falls outside both rules and is not on this page; a few of EIA's plants lie in such cells. Cells that were not imaged are hatched on the map.
• Regions are counties, and border cells are kept whole. Texas is run as a state, so the regions on this page are its counties. A map cell that straddles the border with a neighbouring state or with Mexico is counted in full, so a few panels outside Texas are in this page's total.
• The plausibility check cannot vouch for the county figures here. It compares each county's ground-mounted capacity with its rooftop capacity, and most counties with a park fail it. That is expected where rooftop systems are mostly too small for the model to see, since the comparison then has little to divide by. It also means the check says little either way about false detections on open ground.

Treat this as an early estimate from an active research pipeline, not a census. What it offers is a reproducible way to estimate distributed solar from free satellite imagery and open-source models where official statistics are thin or missing. Expect the figures to move as the evidence behind them grows.

Nothing on this page rests on hand-mapped ground truth from this country. Exhaustively mapped areas -- every panel in a few square kilometres, drawn by hand -- are what turns a detection into a capacity estimate: they measure how much of a flagged roof is actually covered in panels, and how many real installations the detectors miss entirely. Until some exist here, read these figures accordingly. Mapping one is the most useful thing anyone can contribute.

Layers. "Show" picks the quantity the cells are coloured by: the Best estimate, the OSM-mapped capacity alone, the satellite detections above 400 m², rooftop PV below it, farm ground PV below it (arrays beside fields, where the farm detector has run), or the gap between the Best estimate and what is already mapped, which is where mapping effort pays off most. Each cell shows its total in MWp. The colour scale is logarithmic and is refitted to whichever quantity is shown; the legend always states its range.

Your own data. "Layers" → "Add a layer" overlays a GeoJSON file, a CSV with latitude/longitude columns, a GeoJSON URL, an XYZ raster tile URL or a WMS (use {bbox-epsg-3857} in its GetMap URL). Files are read in your browser and are not uploaded anywhere. The live OpenStreetMap overlay queries the public Overpass API for the area in view when you zoom in, so it shows mapping done after this page was built.

Exports. Every figure downloads as PNG (for slides), SVG (vector, for papers) and CSV (the numbers behind it); the map as PNG with its legend and attribution, and the grid as GeoJSON or CSV. Basemap imagery and tiles keep their own providers' terms: OpenStreetMap data is © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), the grey canvas and the satellite imagery © Esri and its partners.