New High-Resolution Solar Data and Analysis Provides In-Depth Look at Solar Resources in Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East
Undertaking a project of this size required collaborative effort. The USAID Missions, or satellite offices, in Ukraine and Tanzania first worked with their partners at NREL to establish what the research and analysis priorities for each country would be. Based on those priorities, the team at NREL saw how this data set could address some of their overlapping needs.
Having easy and free access to these robust data is vital for solar developers and potential purchasers of the electricity because it helps them estimate the expected amount of electricity generated for a given percentage of years of a project, which informs an important parameter called the exceedance probability.
Solar resource data is now available for Ukraine through RE Data Explorer, with wind resource data following later in 2024. Map illustration by Billy Roberts, NREL. Beyond solar data, the USAID Ukraine Mission is interested in generating robust, long-term wind data as well. Using a novel methodology developed at NREL, a team in NREL’s Strategic Energy Analysis Center is creating a high-resolution data set by using artificial intelligence algorithms to downscale of existing climate models. To do that, they train the AI model on high-resolution modeled data for the United States then apply it to lower-resolution climate data for Ukraine.
By making the new, long-term time series data set easy to access and freely available to the public, Tanzania and other African nations are better poised to accomplish their energy goals.