Zambia's PV Atlas

Best estimate: 526 MWp, with a 90% range of 451–699 MWp. That range covers two specific, measured sources of uncertainty -- but not everything that could move this number. Below: what's inside the range, and what isn't.

What's inside the range:

• The two "panel area to power" conversion numbers. One converts rooftop panel area to kWp, the other converts open-ground solar-farm land to kWp. Both are measured against real, confirmed power plants rather than assumed, but each carries its own uncertainty.
• How well the detection model finds panels of different sizes. Its measured precision and recall were checked installation-size by installation-size, and that check itself has a margin of error.

What's outside the range -- and can't be added back in with more arithmetic:

• 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.
• A third of the hand-mapped capacity here had never been built. Zambia's OpenStreetMap solar population is small enough to check one polygon at a time, and eight large power=plant perimeters covering 11.7 km² turned out, under the imagery, to be bare ground, bush or fields -- announced project sites mapped as if complete. Removing them moved the hand-mapped tier down by roughly a third. Nowhere else in this project is the mapped population small enough to audit this way, which is worth remembering when reading a larger country's map.

Treat this as an early-stage estimate from an active research pipeline, not a finished census. What's genuinely new here -- a reproducible way to estimate distributed solar from free satellite imagery and open-source AI, in places where official statistics are sparse or absent -- holds regardless of whether any single number on this page turns out exactly right. Expect these figures to keep moving 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.