The EU is installing renewable energy at a never-before-seen pace, with Poland among the top five producers of solar power on the continent. But how can existing energy infrastructure keep pace with the speed at which renewable energy is needed? The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) helps assess the best locations for utility-scale solar development. Poland serves as a case study demonstrating how CLMS data can power the green transition.
Key figures
of Poland’s land was deemed suitable for utility-scale solar systems
This amount could generate enough electricity to meet the annual needs of 200 million homes
The number of Poland-sized populations that could be powered with this amount of energy
The challenge
Although Poland ranks among the top five solar power producers in Europe, it still faces challenges from an aging energy distribution infrastructure. A surge in solar energy production risks outpacing the country’s ability to connect new installations to the grid efficiently.
The solution
Pablo Benalcazar, Assistant Professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences, argued that utility-scale solar projects could overcome these stability issues. In 2024, he led a small team in analysing the possibilities, using CLMS data on land cover and land use to better understand which areas were suitable for these projects.
Results and impacts
By leveraging CLMS data and the insights from other EU studies, Pablo and his team concluded that 3.61% of the country’s land was suitable for utility-scale solar systems. That might not sound like a large number, but that amount of land has the potential to power 200 million homes –13x more homes than exist in all of Poland!
