Online data and tools for estimation of solar electricity in Africa: the PVGIS approach

We present interactive web tools for map-based query of a solar radiation database and for performance assessment of solar photovoltaic systems. The high-resolution geographic database covers the Mediterranean Basin, Africa and South-West Asia. Daily global irradiation was primarily computed from Meteosat satellite images by the Heliosat-2 method and stored in the HelioClim-1 database. From this database, long term monthly and yearly averages of global horizontal irradiation were derived for the period 1985-2004. Using the PVGIS method, based on the solar radiation model r.sun, interpolation of the clear-sky index and terrain shadowing, the original spatial resolution of HelioClim-1 database (15' x 15') was enhanced to 2 km x 2 km. A set of web tools was developed to query basic climatic and geographic data for a chosen location, and to estimate and optimize energy output from photovoltaic system at arbitrary inclination and orientation of modules. The PVGIS system can be accessed at http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvgis/pv/.