What the satellite says about five registered projects.

The limits of this read

• Ten metres to a pixel. A turbine, a substation bay and a row of modules are all smaller than that, so what is read is a block of ground rather than a piece of equipment.
• A share here is a share of a box, not of a plant. The box is sized from capacity and capped at 6 km on a side, so for any plant above roughly 1.1 GW it holds part of the site.
• The box is centred on the coordinate the project tracker carries, which its own source calls an indicative project or locality point. Reading the most recent scene over twenty tracked projects found that most of those points land on the town a project is named after. Dumat Al Jandal is among these five to show what that looks like, and every scene there is read as unclear. Two projects that share one coordinate, as Shuaibah 1 and 2 do and as Saad 1 and 2 do, cannot be told apart at all.
• The thresholds are fixed numbers, chosen by reading one built site and two empty ones. They are not calibrated against ground truth, and no confidence figure is attached to any class.
• Cloud, cirrus and cloud shadow come from the scene classification the publisher ships, read over the box rather than over the scene. Dust is not masked, and a dusty scene shifts reflectance across the whole box.
• Wind reads worse than solar. Nothing about a turbine darkens the ground, so a wind farm has to be read from the brightening of pads and tracks, which covers a small and scattered share of any box this size, and which a new quarry or a growing town produces as well.
• The operating class is not an independent reading of operation. Imagery cannot see a grid connection, so that class requires the register to state one. It is the register and the imagery agreeing, not the imagery confirming the register.

This prototype is published to be argued with. If you work on change detection, Sentinel-2 time series or asset-level verification and want the method tested, extended across the rest of the register, or held against ground truth, write to contact@renewablevision.com.sa. The metrics, the thresholds and the scene ids are published with each site and in the JSON endpoint, so a reading can be checked rather than taken on trust.