The image of McCamey, TX at the top shows a patch of earth being tapped for every last ounce of energy it has to offer. A new, several-square-mile solar farm that powers more than 56,000 residences — and is still under construction — is ringed by dozens of wind turbines (powering an additional 86,000+ homes) strategically placed on ridges nearby in a landscape strewn with oil and gas infrastructure. The area is overwhelmingly industrial and remote — Lubbock, the next closest city, is nearly 200 miles away.

Leveraging information both visible and invisible to the naked eye, Descartes Labs is using an array of earth observation satellites to track energy infrastructure development. Since the U.S. as a whole relies so heavily on Texas energy, developments in the state’s infrastructure have an impact on millions of people. In McCamey and throughout the state (particularly the western half), wind, solar, and oil and gas together make up the story of modern Texas energy production.

We mapped these three energy sources by applying deep learning computer vision models to satellite imagery. These models, trained with a diverse set of satellite image data, perform sophisticated pattern matching using neural networks to detect and delineate energy infrastructure. Using the Descartes Labs platform, which natively enables scalable cloud computing, we can train, iterate on, validate and deploy these models quickly and at a massive scale.

As an example, our oil and gas model can be run over Texas, a state approximately the size of Spain, from National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAIP) data at 1 meter resolution, in a matter of hours. What follows is a rundown of the culmination of multiple projects at Descartes Labs. Individually, each reveals the state’s success in a particular energy source, but together they illuminate a truly enormous and diverse energy powerhouse.