Management and exploitation of solar resource knowledge

In past years there has been substantial funding from the European Commission to develop information systems on solar radiation data, such as the European Solar Radiation Atlas, the projects SoDa, Satel-Light, PVGIS, PVSAT, PVSAT-2 or Heliosat-3 and the Envisolar project of the European Space Agency (ESA). Additionally national services were set up as Meteonorm by Meteotest in Switzerland and SOLEMI by DLR in Germany. From the regional point of view, the projects focused mainly on Europe or its regions, leading to the situation that several different data bases exist in parallel developed by different approaches, including those exploiting satellite data. Large steps forward have been made for the benefit of research, renewable energy industry, policy making and the environment. Nevertheless, these multiple efforts have led to a fragmentation and uncoordinated access: different sources of information and solar radiation products are now available, but uncertainty about their quality remains. Although a number of institutions have developed approaches for solar energy resource assessments, the individual methods have not been cross-compared and benchmarked. Validation covered mainly the developed methods. At the same time, communities of users lack common understanding how to exploit the developed knowledge. The project MESoR is a European funded Coordination Action which aims at removing the uncertainty and improving the management of the solar energy resource knowledge. The project includes activities in user guidance (benchmarking of models and data sets; development of a handbook on best practices on how to use solar resource data), unification of access to information (by adopting a Service Oriented Approach (SOA) through the extensive use of Web Services offering a one stop-acces to remotely located databases) use of advanced information technologies; offering one-stop-access to several databases), connecting to other initiatives (INSPIRE of the EU, POWER of the NASA, SHC and PVPS of the IEA, GMES/GEO) and to related scientific communities (energy, meteorology, geography, medicine, ecology), and dissemination (stakeholders involvement, future R&D, communication). The results of past and present large-scale initiatives in Europe, will be integrated, standardised and disseminated in a harmonised way to facilitate their effective exploitation by stakeholders. This coordination action will contribute to preparation of the future roadmap for R&D and strengthening the European position in the international field.