alt Hacker NewsKind of. Free satellite data starts at 10m resolution per pixel. You will not get a clear signal on small rooftop solar. Same for balcony solar or other near perpendicular installations.
At 10m the only thing you can reliably detect is large scale deployments. If you want to do better than that you need paid data which is prohibitively expensive at large scales.
Current or most recent data is very expensive, indeed, but researchers as well as governments should have access to data that allows them to measure the rates of change across time and extrapolate them, no?