How to find out who owns a solar farm near you

Which solar sites are in the federal records

The Energy Information Administration defines utility-scale generation as power plants with at least 1 megawatt (1,000 kilowatts) of generating capacity. Form EIA-860 is filed for every grid-connected plant whose generators add up to 1 MW or more of nameplate capacity, and it also covers plants scheduled to start operating within 10 years. A monthly companion, the EIA-860M generator inventory, tracks operating, planned and retired generators between annual releases.

The U.S. Large-Scale Solar Photovoltaic Database (USPVDB), built by the U.S. Geological Survey and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, maps solar PV facilities of 1 MW or more with array boundaries digitized from aerial imagery. Its April 2026 release covers 6,611 facilities in 49 states and the District of Columbia. USGS notes that releases generally lag installations by more than a year.

If the array you are looking at is smaller than about 1 MW, such as panels on a warehouse roof or a small field behind a farm, it will not be in either federal register; it may appear in state program or permit records instead.

Step by step: from a field of panels to a company name

1. Locate the plant. Use the USPVDB map viewer to find the array outline at your location and note its name and capacity, or search PanelCensus utility-scale records filtered by your state and county.
2. Read the operator and owner. EIA-860 has a utility file listing the reporting entity for each plant and an ownership file that records owners for generators with shared ownership or owned by an entity other than the operator. PanelCensus site records show these as operator and owner where the source provides them.
3. Follow the developer and operator. Open the developer or utility and operator profile linked from the record to see the company's other projects.
4. Expect project companies. In the federal records many plants are held by a limited liability company named after the project; among the largest plants in PanelCensus, most owner fields are LLCs of that kind. The owner field may therefore show something like "Example Solar, LLC" rather than a familiar parent company; the parent is sometimes listed alongside it, and sometimes only in corporate filings.
5. Separate the land from the plant. The company that owns the generating equipment is not necessarily the owner of the land under it. For the landowner, check your county's property records.

MWac versus MWdc: why capacity numbers disagree

Solar capacity is quoted two ways. DC capacity (MWdc) is the sum of the panels' nameplate ratings. AC capacity (MWac) is set by the inverters that convert the panels' direct current to the alternating current used on the grid. Plants are usually built with more panel capacity than inverter capacity, so DC figures typically run 10–30% higher than AC figures for the same site; EIA reports inverter loading ratios usually between 1.13 and 1.30.

EIA reports all capacity in AC terms, because electricity is sold and operated on an AC basis. USPVDB publishes both an AC and a DC capacity for each facility. When a news story, a county filing and a federal table give different megawatt figures for the same plant, the AC/DC difference is the first thing to check.

What PanelCensus adds, and its limits

PanelCensus merges utility-scale records from USPVDB, EIA-860 and EIA-860M with state program and permit records, deduplicating plants by location and capacity and preferring the federal registers. That puts a site's location, capacity, status, owner, operator and developer, where known, in one record, alongside the largest plants ranking.

Of 12,862 utility-scale records, 8,990 carry an owner name and 10,051 carry coordinates; 334 are EIA-860M plants listed as under construction. Owner and operator text is kept as the source reported it, so the same company can appear under several spellings, and in some state program records the "operator" is the utility the plant connects to rather than the company that runs it. For anything that matters legally or financially, confirm against the current EIA-860 files and the county's records.