Nationally Consistent, Locally Incomplete: A Bayesian Remote-Sensing Audit of Rooftop Photovoltaic Registries
Abstract: Tracking the energy transition requires reliable statistics on renewable deployment. Rooftop photovoltaics (PV) are especially hard to track, owing to their decentralised nature, and the resulting inaccuracies in official statistics are known but not quantified. Remote sensing offers an independent way to identify rooftop PV systems. We introduce a Bayesian framework to estimate the ground-truth rooftop PV capacity from remote sensing detections, turning an imperfect detector into an uncertainty-aware measurement instrument. Applied to France, the corrected detections estimate a capacity of 4.03 GWp [3.96--4.11] (99% credible interval) of rooftop PV below 36 kWp, matching the transmission system operator's connection data within 3.3% nationally, while identifying local under-reports of up to 61% of local capacity. We also document and quantify a significant truncation bias in French rooftop PV open data. Beyond France, the approach paves the way for more reliable estimates of rooftop PV capacity worldwide.