Global Solar Atlas: summary of solar power potential globally
globalsolaratlas.infoEven if a location doesn't show high potential, it shouldn't matter.
Solar panels are dirt cheap, just put up more of them. With plug-in solar, rooftop solar and vertical solar, there can be enough production.
If all buildings in a city start producing, we eliminate a third of the cost of grid. Transmission network is not needed (or doesn't need to grow) we produce energy where we consume, in every city. Transmission networks are costly and time consuming. Vertical solar will get us there. Vertical solar will be the cheapest form of energy, because it can use the structural elements already on a building (no need of , adds ~4 hours of production (same as adding batteries, could be cheaper?). Vertical solar can immediately be deployed as fence, we have some kind of wall/fence between buildings everywhere.
Europe is the only place which shows a little less potential. They can build solar farms in Spain, Turkey, North Africa and add transmission lines.
Europe has very high per capita income and colonial wealth, from Roman Empire, Vikings, Portugese, Spanish Empire, English Empire, Dutch and French colonies. With that level of income and wealth, adding dirt cheap solar panels, a bit more to account for lower production should not be a big deal.
Farmers in Europe should ask for solar subsides: shade for their livestock, grow crops that grow better in shade, grow tropical crops using solar energy in greenhouses, harvest both solar and crops.
Give farmers subsidies to harvest solar instead of [ethanol|biodiesel|biofuels|biomass] (garbage ideas, some posted recently about UK subsidizing biomass, which ships wood from Canada). Millions of acres of land can be used for both solar and livestock or crops. Freeing up the land from bio-nonsense-ideas will lower the cost of food and meat.
Canada also looks okay, the only country that can't go solar is Russia. Low solar potential, but also the Govt may not be too keen on Solar.
In the long run, there will be only two fossil fuel countries: US and Russia. The two great superpowers.
> (garbage ideas, some posted recently about UK subsidizing biomass, which ships wood from Canada)
This is the greenwashing of the UK's largest thermal power station, Drax, which was built for coal.
> colonial wealth, from Roman Empire
I think one or two things may have happened to the distribution of wealth since this event.
The solar deployment is happening, but slowly. I got my panels a decade ago when the subsidy regime in the UK was better. Seasonality is an issue, I would never attempt to go off-grid, but I don't need to.
One of the traditional holdups is very European: the need for permitting, whether that's for the install itself or the grid connection. People still get funny around the appearance of panels. The NIMBY tendency to demand that the entire world looks like a particular bucolic vision of the countryside is really bad.
Drax, largest biomass power station in the world, will stop burning trees from British Columbia entirely within the next year.
The company Drax Group said its Canadian wood pellet plant, may still continue to produce pellets in Canada, but these will be exported to third-party buyers, primarily in Asia.
https://www.businessenergydeals.co.uk/blog/drax-biomass-powe...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/26/drax-pow...
Drax originally claimed that the imported wood would only be used while UK supply was built up. Needless to say, that never happened.
Then, once it became clear that the plan to source from the UK wasn't going to work, they claimed the subsidies should continue to enable them to fit CCS kit. Needless to say, that also hasn't happened.
Taken separately, you could probably squint a bit and say that either scheme was fair enough - worth trying, if only as a minor hedge against unexpected problems with more promising renewables + storage schemes. But taken together, it's hard to ignore the pattern of repeated failures wrapped in endless dissembling.
Time to pull the plug and turn the site (and its huge grid connections) into a giant battery storage array with a bit of useful solar draped over the top.
There was a proposed project to build a massive solar wind and battery installation in Morocco, and link it to the UK via undersea cable. I believe it collapsed due to the lack of companies able to supply that much cable and the current government also didn’t support it. Also geopolitics still matters, any government is going to be very wary about getting a significant portion of electricity from a region that might become hostile in the future. Your comment ignores that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...
If we were going to run hundreds of miles of cable across the Atlantic coastline, it should probably make land in Portugal, ancient ally of England, and thence to the Spanish grid.
(Unfortunately it seems Portugal not doing so great at renewables admin: https://theportugalpost.com/posts/portugal-faces-eu-court-ba... )
The UK does actually have a few offshore connectors planned north-south, because that's politically easier (although more expensive) than running a spine of pylons down the country.
It is funny/infuriating that the Morocco project, a 3.6GW plan to power millions of people, gets treated politically as yet another "local resident angry about barely visible development" story. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8659z0p0do
>> Europe is the only place which shows a little less potential. They can build solar farms in Spain, Turkey, North Africa and add transmission lines.
Traveled a lot in Europe earlier this year (by rail). Saw quite a lot of solar installed, both on buildings and in open land.
Saw even more wind turbines. Europe may have less solar potential, but clearly they still have enough sun to make solar economically viable. And the addition of wind turbines makes sense; that co-exists very well with farm land, and nicely balances solar production.
Haven't visited Europe in a few years. Last time I was there, on a train routed through less populated areas of northern France, I saw nuclear plants emitting steam. For all their downsides they do feed a lot of power into the grid. It is a relatively clean option.
You make a strong case for alternative options. I guess the path taken pivots on evaluation of the tradeoffs, and significantly, who does the evaluating.
France has legacy nuclear plants because of history and inertia. If they were forced to start from scratch today it wouldn't make sense to build nuclear plants, they're not competitive (and France can't build them effectively now.) Flamanville 3 was a fiasco.
I wonder why not. Maybe red tape has multiplied to the extent that nothing interesting can be built these days? I used to have a flat in France what was powered by a small amount of nuclear generated electricity - it had good insulation too. It seemed a practical co2 free solution providing good quality of life decades ago.
> Transmission network is not needed (or doesn't need to grow) we produce energy where we consume, in every city
How do you figure that? That may be viable in 50 years when most buildings are insulated well enough to cover their own energy usage in the depths of winter with rooftop solar and the winters get milder due to climate change. But I don't see how this could work out in the near future.
> English Empire
You mean British Empire.
The Act of Union had at least two willing parties.
Actually they weren't. The majority of the populations of Scotland and England did not want it in 1707. There was rioting in Edinburgh when it happened and the signatories had to go into a cellar to hide from it. Most English people didn't want to annex Scotland either, since they thought it threatened their trade.
Under 0.01% of the Scottish population had a vote for the parliament in the first place. The Scottish politicians were bribed and there is a document showing how much each was paid (which is ridiculously hard to get hold of online, for some reason.)
The English parliament continued with a few extra members, while the Scottish parliament was abolished. The speaker of the English parliament boasted, "We have catch'd Scotland and will bind her fast."
When the king of Scotland takes over England and then his descendant wants to unify his governments that’s all you get. It’s not a democracy.
The Acts of Union were in 1707, over a century after the Union of the Crowns. They were nothing to do with King James VI. The Scottish Parliament continued throughout the 17th century, apart from during the Cromwellian invasion.
By the way, England has been in regnal union with a number of places including Hanover, the Netherlands, France, Denmark (+ Norway) and Normandy.
Also the title was "King of Scots" not "King of Scotland", another common mistake.
> Solar panels are dirt cheap
As long as we have china shitting them out and fossil allowing them to shit them out this cheap *
>>US and Russia. The two great superpowers. If you count by how many nuclear bombs they have and the unpredictability of their governments, then sure they are.
> Even if a location doesn't show high potential, it shouldn't matter.
It all depends. In some places where install costs are high and you can get good deals on TOU (i.e. free power hours) - batteries are vastly better deal.
Here's the tool I use for estimating solar performance: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/#api_5.3
It's also includes historic weather patterns and has some simple modeling tools built into it that can help predict how well off grid, grid tied and hybrid solar systems will perform. So far I have found that it's predictions map very closely to what I've experienced on the ground with my solar array.
I put 7.2kw on my roof in Canada. Tight valley, tons of snow.
You know what I learned about all the projections and estimates?
It’s a complete waste of time . Panels are so cheap now just slap up as many as will physically fit and get on with it. Everything else is a waste of time.
Over their 25+ year lifespan I’ll profit $25k-$30k.
It’s the no brainer of all time.
As soon as my garage build is done I’ll cover that roof in another 8kw of panels too.
I am just astonished, I haven't been following the cost evolution of solar panels, but, as I have quite some tree canopy for our house, I left the the installation of panels to "later", I ran the calculations today for a city in Germany.
- Took the cost of a complete system from a big provider + 30% for the installation.
- Ran the calculations using the JRC tool[0] recommended in the previous comment.
- Added 75% loss because of the tree canopy.
I am still 2 to 3 times cheaper per kWh than my current provider. I would have no trees etc., I would be about 10 times cheaper!
Solar panels are basically free these days.
Doing a quick calculation, PV panels are about €50/m2. Putting regular roof tiles on there costs about €30/m2. In other words: we've reached a point where it almost makes economic sense to put them on there even if you leave them disconnected!
If you aren't putting solar panels on your roof, you're (literally) burning money. Pretty much all of the cost is in getting someone to install them.
They've become so cheap that I'll reach positive ROI on a sloped roof facing straight north, in Northern Germany.
I thought this was very interesting - there's the map upfront, but you can also drill into individual countries and regions with some nice tables. Some "obvious" things here, though a few surprises:
* The solar potential of a gloomy, northern locale like the UK is "only" half of somewhere sunny like Australia. Though I can imagine the swings between seasons are greater.
* Northern Canada has a surprising amount of potential, compared to European regions at the same latitude
Canada compared to Mongolia of similar latitude, has lower potential though. Apparently that is because Mongolia is a desert and has no forests, very dry and high in elevation. The cold is no issue. The panels there produce 1.8 times more. The reason that Northern Europe is worse than Canada of the same latitude is apparently because of maritime proximity that increases humidity that diffuses light. Australia doesn't have maritime climate.
Cold actually increases PV output.
I wonder if the map accounts for this,
Without accounting for it, the maps wouldn't look like that. Cold, dry and high altitude increase the performance of solar.
Dry and high altitude increase the performance because those increase the amount of sunlight hitting the ground. The effect of temperature would be on top of those effects.
Places with most potential:
Australia (all of it!)
Most of South America: Chile (darkest on the map!), Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil.
Mexico and Cuba (everywhere), all of Central America
Western US
Africa (everywhere) Middle East (everywhere) Mongolia, North and Western China, Tibet
Europe has one of highest wind energy potentials instead. They can harvest wind energy in the winter when they need it most.
https://globalwindatlas.info/en/
And Europe has historical expertise and European companies that they can subsidize.
Nice wind energy map there. Surprised that some places are good for both wind and solar. There is also Geothermal.. valleys have higher potential for geothermal
Europe geothermal. There are probably better maps than this:
https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/project-innerspace-completes-...
Wind energy, or any any energy, should not be subsidized. This is only hides the real costs from the customers, moves the energy costs to tax payers or government debt.
Maybe governments should support energy with cheap loans. This is not a subsidy, as loans have to be payed back.
It's not really easy to build wind energy in Europe as current windmills are 300 meter tall and the windier parts of Europe are often the dense parts. People don't want a 300 meter structure near them.
The recently built tallest is 300m at the hub, 365m at the top of the blade.
However that is specifically designed to be sited to catch air above existing wind turbines to get to a second layer of wind.
Standard ones are half that size and more cost-efficient currently.
In general bigger means cheaper per KWh but you start to hit various bottlenecks as size increases.
You're right pointing out most aren't this tall, still people don't really want +- 200m tall structures anywhere near them, which is a big problem in dense areas.
Access to low-risk funding over the decade needed to recoup investment is probably the actual blocker on solar potential.
Notably that's something that can be changed by human intervention.
€561 million is been loaned to build the EU's largest solar park, Dama Solar, Romania.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/energy-developer-rez...
Of course, banks are not risking, that the future electricity price will be low during peak solar production and they don't get their money back:
"Dama Solar was also awarded two Contracts for Difference (CfDs) by the Romanian government last year. The grants are part of a low-carbon energy-support scheme paid for with EU funds, based on CfD, which set the power price at an agreed level for 15 years."
I believe the CfD doesn't pay out during negative price periods. They have structured the project with batteries that store energy at those times and resell it via other means. So there is some risk being managed there.
" CfD beneficiaries will not receive CfD difference payments for any quantity of electricity delivered into the national energy system in any period in which the market value corresponding to that delivered quantity is negative. "
https://cms.law/en/rou/legal-updates/romania-enacts-cfd-supp...
https://energy-solutions.co/policy-intelligence/tax-credits-...
" The target quota for photovoltaics was slightly surpassed, with 1.49 GW approved. Conversely, only 1.26 GW was allocated in the wind project segment, against the available 2 GW. Average winning prices were EUR 40.35 per MWh and EUR 73.89 per MWh, respectively. "
https://balkangreenenergynews.com/romania-completes-second-r...
Using Global Solar Atlas we can calculate the economics of Dama Solar project. 1.3GWp solar plant should in Arad, Romania produce on average 1654850 MWh each year.
Project costs $636.3m (€561m)
https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/rezolv-secures-636...
At the guaranteed price EUR 40.35 per MWh, the project should pay back in about 8.4 years.
I always wish maps like that would include some sort of seasonality score. Maybe a worst week / best week ratio.
As it is, the map is useful until solar goes to a double digit percentage of total yearly generation. Any higher, and seasonal places start needing backup generation capacity that is only running in winter (or during monsoon), which does violent things to electricity markets.
For solar, seasonality would be best addressed by thermal storage, which I mention here frequently.
This is being pursued most interestingly by Standard Thermal's "hot dirt" approach. They've updated their web page to include a few more technical details, which look to make sense economically (for example, they're putting the resistive heater(s) outside the dirt piles where it/they can be easily maintained).
The round trip efficiency (RTE) might be 40%, which is actually not bad since the input power (crude DC direct from solar modules) is quite cheap, not needing inverters or a grid connection sized to that DC power. Thermal losses are < 1%/month.
The technology would work down to a scale of about 100 kW average power, which is quite small all considered. Good for village-scale microgrids or individual small industrial enterprises. Scaling up, the average power would be similar to that of a large earthen dam of the same size, only the dirt would be used for to hold heat, not hold back water in a river, and could be sited almost anywhere. Heat retention improves as the size scales up; a dirt pile of the size of the largest dams, if it had been built and heated in the Bronze Age, would still be hot inside.
There's another approach I recently learned about: Converting coal plants to burn metal fuel (iron powder <=> rust):
See e.g.: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666352X2...
Volumetric energy density is pretty decent, and it's easy and safe to store (albeit heavy). The big appeal is that it seems feasible to convert coal plants while touching only their burner (there is a smallscale prototype running in Germany AFAIK). You could also potentially even transport the fuel (not sure how the losses look on that though since energy/weight is not very high; maybe ships or trains could still work though).
Drawback is that regenerating the iron powder needs (green) hydrogen and the cycle efficiency is low.
But this could be very helpful for countries like Germany, Poland or especially China to get dispatchable green power from former coal power stations.
> For solar, seasonality would be best addressed by thermal storage
Still, adds a lot of cost and complexity onto cheap solar + 12h of chemical battery storage.
> This is being pursued most interestingly by Standard Thermal's "hot dirt" approach.
Pity they want to do only 400°C. Because once you go towards firebricks and >700°C, you can run practically all thermal chemical processes in a refinery or a polymer plant off the heat, and you can make electricity with a supercritical CO2 turbine at >50% efficiency (in a comparatively tiny package). At the cost of much harder engineering problems, of course.
But its probably worth solving those, because you can do interesting stuff with ultra low cost hot gas. Preheat the charge for a steel mill, design a Hall–Héroult aluminium smelter that keeps the electrolyte bath molten via a gas heat exchanger instead of electricity, ect.
And once you have several GW of guaranteed heat consumers, adding a couple of CO2 peaker turbines isn't such a big leap anymore.
Why did it need to hijack my back button...
the only thing stopping solar are the bought up and dumb politicians.
the U.S is making progress regardless of trump trying to cripple clean energy. even in the southern states solar farms keep going up.
I wonder what makes for that blue region over China? Air pollution?
No, that's the Sichuan Basin. The climate is subtropical with monsoonal rain all summer and dry and cloudy winters. It basically has persistent cloud cover all year and heavy fog. Less than 30 days of sun per year.
These kinds of maps are very misleading. They show averages, and the averages rarely drive the costs - somebody in this thread already noted that Australia is only 2x better than the UK.
The main killer of solar is variability. Northern countries have shorter solar days during winter and can have _weeks_ of overcast days, so these countries would need some kind of backup: either long-term storage, or nuclear.
Many people in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, etc. And even some further north have done the math and it comes up positive.
You have to be realistic of course. There are a few months in the winter where they don't perform well and returns drop well below a single kwh of power. But then you might start getting some bright winter or early spring days and you go back to getting many kwh per day worth of free power as early as February or March.
It's better if you have a battery and if your local energy supplier has favorable contracts.
Long term storage seems to be a be a hobby horse that comes up in a lot of theads like this. The reality with batteries is that the overwhelmingly vast majority is for dealing with short term supply/demand fluctuation. The supply spikes are as important as the demand spikes here. Empty batteries can absorb those.
Anything beyond four hours drops off rapidly in terms of economics. And a few hours is all most energy companies need for planning to spin up or down gas (or coal in some cases) plants or decide to import/export power via cables.
As for nuclear, it's is a lot less flexible and very expensive. And in any case very little of it is coming online for the foreseeable future (next 1-2 decades). We'll get probably quite a few TW of battery, solar, and wind deployed over that time. Nuclear is going to be a rounding error on that even in the best case.
It’s a “hobby horse” because it’s the real physical issue and the main reason we don’t run on 100% renewables, trying to handwave it away is not going to help.
What’s your plan for powering an entire modern industrial economy (cars, houses, industry) for an entire week in the middle of winter with minimal wind and solar? Because that happens fairly frequently.
If you don’t have one, then the default is to keep burning gas as a backup, which is what is happening
> Many people in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, etc. And even some further north have done the math and it comes up positive.
It's not the question of being positive, but being able to cost-effectively replace fossils. I just don't see it happening with solar in countries like Germany or England, because of that storage issue (no way to do it).
Nah, just overprovision like crazy and store what you can.
Germany has currently around 1.5kW of solar installed per person - even in October this yields double-digit GWs at 9am. They can't put all that power to use in summer, but it sure puts a damper on prices off season.
Sure, storage is still being built as there's a market for it, but for now it's still cheaper to just build more solar capacity.
Currently, Germany should invest much more in battery storage as even after a day with peak solar production (May 28), Germany runs on gas and coal during night.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/06/08/solar-records-getting-b...
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...
Yes, and this capacity is doing bupkis during winter: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&...
It would need to be increased around 20x to be a viable replacement, and this is just not feasible.
And no, wind won't help either: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&... - look at the period from 15 to 22 Jan. That's a week of almost no renewable generation, paired with low temperatures.
I used them while designing my system. Just checked the numbers again against last 365 days - 97.5% accurate. Previous check I did year ago - I think it was more like 99.9% accurate.
My 3 month old system is running about 20% above their numbers, not clear on where the difference is. From some other modeling using pvlib, I suspect that the panels are over producing, as that’s the easiest way to make the numbers work. It’s also possible that the measurements are miscalibrated, or we’ve just had weather that’s not in line with historical averages.