Tracking the solar revolution: inside the Q3 2025 Solar Asset Mapper release

Summary

The Q3 2025 Solar Asset Mapper release is now live, revealing a 5.6% rise in detected global solar capacity to 1,185 GW across nearly 105,000 facilities worldwide.

Saudi Arabia takes the spotlight with a 22% quarterly jump in installations, while Africa’s solar footprint expands by 6.1% as deployment accelerates across the continent.

Plus, a look at tracking solar deployment beyond TZ-SAM: our new research on distributed solar in Pakistan estimates 27.5 GW of rooftop and small-scale systems, highlighting an emerging frontier in the energy transition.

As global leaders prepare to gather in Belém, Brazil, for the world’s largest annual climate summit next week, many will be reflecting on the mounting challenges facing the world’s climate agenda.

Amidst these headwinds, the steady, unwavering growth of solar power offers a rare, but much-needed, glimmer of optimism. From vast solar parks taking shape in the Middle East to rooftop systems multiplying across Pakistan, the global advance of solar energy demonstrates that the fight against climate change – and for an affordable, secure energy transition – is being waged quietly but resolutely in every corner of the world.

Today, we’re releasing the latest quarterly update of our Solar Asset Mapper (TZ-SAM) dataset, which continues to provide on-the-ground evidence of how this transformation is taking shape.

What is Solar Asset Mapper?

Solar deployment continues to accelerate — and keeping track is no small feat. That’s where TZ-SAM comes in: a global, asset-level solar dataset built using planetary-scale machine learning.

Learn more about TZ-SAM’s origins in our Explainer, and improvements to its underlying detection algorithms in our Q3 2024 Update.

What’s in the release this quarter?

This quarter, TZ-SAM registered a 5.6% increase in detected solar capacity worldwide, bringing total installations to 1,185 GW.

Our global count of solar facilities has now reached nearly 105,000. Compared with the previous release, the dataset has expanded by an additional 1,713 square kilometres of solar coverage, or nearly 2,000 individual facilities.

In terms of geographical distribution, we continue to see solar deployment concentrated in a handful of countries. According to TZ-SAM detections, the top five nations now account for 71.4% of total global capacity, slightly up from 70.4% last quarter.

The top ten leaderboard remains largely unchanged, containing the usual mix of representatives from four continents. However, the gap between the two leading superpowers seems to be widening this quarter: China’s detected capacity now exceeds that of the United States by 337 GW, compared to 315 GW in the previous quarter.

Region in the spotlight: Africa

Until recently, Africa has appeared relatively dormant in TZ-SAM, recording the lowest detected solar capacity of any continent. This is despite the fact that the region possesses some of the world’s richest solar resources, estimated to account for 60% of global potential.

Encouragingly, this quarter’s update points to an upward trend. TZ-SAM detections show a 6.1% increase in solar capacity across African countries, bringing the region’s total to 14.3 GW.

South Africa and Egypt continue to lead the continent’s solar deployment, together representing around 60% of total detected capacity. The remaining installations are spread across the 53 other African states covered by TZ-SAM, though most register 1 MW or less of detected capacity per country.

Looking ahead, we expect to capture further growth in upcoming cycles, based on the reported 60% surge in solar panel imports into Africa over the past year, as highlighted in recent research by Ember. However, TZ-SAM's ability to capture how many of those imported panels are installed will depend on whether those panels are deployed as part of utility-scale solar farms, which TZ-SAM excels in detecting, or small-scale distributed solar, which requires different techniques.

Country in the spotlight: Saudi Arabia

Since early 2025, Saudi Arabia has emerged as a standout performer, with solar deployment expanding at a remarkable pace. According to the latest TZ-SAM data, the Kingdom has now reached 10.8 GW of installed solar capacity, up 22% from the previous quarter and more than double the capacity recorded a year ago.

TZ-SAM detections closely mirror market reports on the ground. In August, Saudi Arabia commissioned three mega solar projects with a combined capacity of 2.8 GW in the Hail and Riyadh regions, all of which are captured in our dataset.

These time lapse images from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite show the rapid expansion of solar facilities in Saudi Arabia between the summers of 2023 and 2025.

A substantial pipeline of new projects is underway as the petrostate advances toward its 2030 goal of 50% renewable energy in the power mix. In October, four additional solar projects totalling 3 GW in capacity were awarded to developers. Among these, the Najran Solar Energy Project is reported to offer the world’s second-lowest solar tariff, at roughly 1.1 US cents per kWh.

The strength of TZ-SAM lies in its consistent methodology and regular update cadence, which enables us to reliably track solar adoption trends across countries and regions. The predominance of utility-scale solar parks in Saudi Arabia plays to these strengths, allowing for robust monitoring and validation of the country’s rapidly accelerating clean energy rollout.

TZ-SAM and distributed solar: the case of Pakistan

While TZ-SAM has been covering systems as small as 0.3 MW in the United States to multi-gigawatt solar parks in China, the tool’s primary focus is utility-scale systems, which have led global solar growth over the past decade. However, in many markets, the next frontier may lie in distributed systems – the much smaller installations that are being built from the grassroots and which are quietly reshaping local energy landscapes.

In a first attempt to bridge this emerging gap, our Machine Learning team has been experimenting with a new approach to estimate distributed solar capacity – one that’s fast, scalable, and cost-effective.

Our first study was in Pakistan, a market where distributed solar has surged amidst ongoing electricity access and affordability challenges, and where official statistics have failed to keep pace.

Using a combination of higher-resolution imagery, sampling, labelling, and extrapolation techniques, we estimated that Pakistan may have 27.5 GW of distributed solar capacity installed nationwide. Added to the 1.5 GW of utility-scale capacity captured in TZ-SAM, that brings Pakistan’s total estimated solar capacity to an impressive 29 GW.

You can read more about the methodology and findings in our dedicated blog here.

When is the next release?

TZ-SAM data is published retrospectively, with data for the preceding quarter delivered in the current quarter.

TZ-SAM users who download TZ-SAM through this form and tick the box opting-in for quarterly release updates have the data delivered directly to their inbox.

What’s next?

Commercial licensing of the TZ-SAM dataset is available for select partners. If you are interested in discussing how we can license TZ-SAM data to support your business, please contact us using this form, and our team will be in touch.

The TZ-SAM dataset is open-access under a Creative Commons license for non-commercial use. Download it now, and register for quarterly updates.

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