Washington -- An international
program created to help 13 developing nations understand
the extent of their solar and wind energy resources is expanding
geographically and adding other renewable energy information
to its free and growing public database.
The Solar and Wind Energy Resource Assessment
(SWERA) program began in 2001 as a $9.1 million pilot project,
co-financed with $6.8 million from the Global Environment
Facility (GEF), an independent financial organization that
helps developing countries fund projects and programs that
protect the global environment.
The United Nations Environment Programme’s
(UNEP’s) Division of Technology, Industry and Economics
manages the program in collaboration with more than 25 partners
from around the world, including the U.S. Department of
Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL),
NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).
“It struck us from the very beginning,”
Mark Radka, chief of the Energy Branch in that UNEP division,
told America.gov, “that [countries] need good information
about their resources for sensible renewable energy policies
in government and on the investment side.”
For 13 pilot countries -- Bangladesh, Brazil,
China, Cuba, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras,
Kenya, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sri Lanka -- SWERA technical
partners took what Radka calls the “critical first
step” in creating indigenous renewable enterprises:
they produced maps of each country’s solar and wind
resources.
MAPPING WIND AND SUN
Satellite imagery is critical to assessing
each country’s wind and solar energy potential. To
produce solar maps, scientists used weather satellite imagery
to infer a country’s resources. To produce wind maps,
they used high-resolution imagery and high-quality numerical
models of wind flow over complex terrain.
The maps, Dave Renné, principal project
leader in NREL’s International Programs Group, told
America.gov, “were of high enough quality to be favorable
for large-scale renewable energy applications. Many of the
countries never had that information before, so it was an
eye-opening experience and helped accelerate and broaden
interest in renewable energy development in the countries.”
The technical enterprises of several nations
contributed to the SWERA assessment project, especially,
in the project’s early days, NREL. These included
the Risø National Laboratory at the Technical University
of Denmark and the German Aerospace Center’s Institute
of Technical Thermodynamics. SWERA also worked with country
partners and local universities and government technical
institutes in developing the assessments.
Combining solar and wind data from many
different measuring instruments and techniques into a standard
product was another goal, Radka said.
Part of the reason SWERA appealed to UNEP,
he added, was that it gave the organization “a chance
to bring together different schools of thought on how one
uses satellite-derived information mainly collected for
weather purposes, and come up with a consistent way of using
it, even if the satellites are different.”
From NREL came a useful innovation: making
sure the solar and wind data were compatible with geographic
information systems (GIS) -- computer applications used
to store, view and analyze geographic information, especially
maps. In such digital maps, satellite, aerial photography
and other data representing an area's attributes and characteristics
can be arranged in layers.
GIS helps organize the SWERA data, and an
analysis can tell users, for example, how many square kilometers
of a region have certain categories (strengths) of wind
within a certain distance from transmission lines, roads
and populated areas.
A GLOBAL RESOURCE
The 13-nation pilot project ended in 2006,
but SWERA continues as a program whose geographic area and
renewable energy interests are expanding.
The program now is working to add data on
geothermal and small-scale hydropower energy and, in the
future, biomass. It also is looking for funding from governments,
international financial institutions, users and others.
As part of its geographic expansion, SWERA
is involved in a $15 billion effort announced in January
by the government of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates
to fund renewable energy infrastructure and related projects
in that country, the Middle East/North Africa region and
globally.
“We’re branching out into other
countries,” Radka said, “and going into some
places where assessments have been conducted and the information
exists, but to clean it up and format it and put it into
the archive, even if it might not have been done under the
original project.”
Data are coming in from Morocco and Tunisia,
for example, and from work that NREL, funded by the U.S.
Agency for International Development, did in the Philippines
and the Dominican Republic.
The SWERA archive is housed at the USGS
Earth Resources and Observation Science Data Center in Sioux
Falls, South Dakota, along with a range of computer-based
tools -- two developed at NREL and one in Canada -- to help
energy planners and developers, policymakers, industry representatives,
investors, university researchers and consumers use the
resource.
“SWERA helps remove barriers that
developing countries in particular may face,” Renné
said, “in terms of understanding whether they have
the resources to support a renewable energy initiative.
And it turns out that very often they have more than they
think they do.”
More information about SWERA
is available at the UNEP Web site.
More information about the National
Renewable Energy Laboratory is available at the Department
of Energy Web site.
Cheryl Pellerin /
Washington File Staff Writer
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