Forget Cats, This Neural Network Spots Solar Panels

Stanford's DeepSolar neural network analyzed satellite images to count U.S. solar installations—and there are a lot more than anybody thoughtThere are at least 1.47 million solar installations of varying sizes in the 48 contiguous U.S. states, from home rooftop panels to utility-owned solar power plants.That’s the conclusion of DeepSolar, a machine learning algorithm developed by researchers at Stanford University that searches satellite images for solar panels. The count is higher t