The United States Large-Scale Solar Photovoltaic Database (USPVDB) provides the locations and array boundaries of U.S. front-of-the-meter, ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV) facilities with capacity of 1 megawatt or more. It includes corresponding PV facility information, including panel type, site type, and initial year of operation. The creation of this database was jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) via the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Electricity Markets and Policy Group, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Energy Resources Program. The PV facility records are collected from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), position-verified and digitized from aerial imagery, and checked for quality. EIA facility data are supplemented with additional attributes obtained from public sources.

The data were created by combining publicly available data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) with several additional sources. The locations and array boundaries of all facilities were visually verified and digitized to within 10 meters using high-resolution imagery. Technical specifications of the facilities are drawn from EIA data, and additional information about site type was merged from datasets maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). These data may be used by government agencies, scientists, private companies, and citizens for a variety of analyses. Examples include operational impact analyses related to the role of solar energy in the U.S. electric grid, interactions between PV facilities and wildlife, and investments in PV infrastructure.

Over 4,400 large scale commercial solar facilities are in operation in the United States (as of December, 2021), representing over 60 gigawatts of electric power capacity. Of these, over 3,900 are ground-mounted with capacities of 1MW or more, specified as large scale solar photovoltaic (LSPV) facilities. LSPV ground-mounted installations continue to grow, with over 400 projects coming online in 2021 alone. Currently, a comprehensive, publicly available georectified data describing the locations and spatial footprints of these facilities does not exist.

Analysts from the U.S. Geological Survey and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory collaborated to develop and release the United States Large Scale Solar Photovoltaic Database (). This effort built from the expertise gained while developing the regularly updated United States Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB). Starting from Energy Information Administration (EIA) data, locations of LSPV facilities were visually verified using high-resolution aerial imagery; a polygon was drawn around the extent of facility panel arrays, and facility attributes were appended. Quality assurance and control were achieved via team peer review, and comparing the USPVDB to other datasets USPVDB of US PV.