In a significant leap for green-energy tracking, researchers from Peking University and Alibaba Group’s Damo Academy have used AI to map hundreds of thousands of solar and wind installations across China.

The initiative resulted in a first-of-its-kind national inventory designed to help coordinate the country’s ambitious green transition.

By leveraging a self-developed AI model from Damo, the research team processed a massive 7.56 terabytes of satellite imagery. The algorithm identified 319,972 solar photovoltaic facilities and 91,609 wind turbines across China as of 2022, according to newly released findings published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

“This is the first time we’ve had such a large-scale, high-resolution national inventory of wind and solar facilities,” Liu Yu, a professor at the School of Earth and Space Sciences at Peking University, said in a statement released by Alibaba on Thursday.

“This allows us to see the country’s new-energy landscape from a ‘God’s-eye view’, laying a solid foundation for a series of research such as power-grid optimisation and environmental evaluation,” Liu said.

Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. Damo is the tech giant’s in-house research initiative.