January 2015: The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and partners have released the second edition of the ‘Global Atlas on Renewable Energy,’ which includes maps for a number of renewable energy resources, and new functions and tools. The Atlas initiative aims to provide access for countries to the necessary datasets, expertise and financial support to evaluate their renewable energy potential.

The Global Atlas provides a catalogue of more than 1,000 datasets that allows users to identify areas for further prospection through a visualization of renewable energy resources combined with additional information, including population density, topography, land use and protected areas.

The web-based portal includes maps on solar, wind, geothermal and bioenergy resources, and one marine energy map. New functions and tools include a map gallery, catalogue search by various criteria, a universal data viewer for solar and wind graphs, and a sharing function for maps.

The Global Atlas 2.0 map gallery includes: solar photovoltaic (PV) analyses for Africa; solar and wind maps for different sub-regions of the Americas, Africa and Asia and the Pacific, including the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the Gulf countries, and member countries of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC); and several global and national-level datasets, in particular for solar, wind, geothermal and bioenergy data.

The Global Atlas 2.0 was launched jointly by IRENA, the National Renewable Energy Centre (CENER) of Spain, the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology of the United Arab Emirates, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of the US, and MINES ParisTech of France. The initiative is coordinated by IRENA, with support from 67 countries and an international consortium of data and expertise providers. [IRENA Global Atlas website] [Publication: Global Atlas for Renewable Energy 2.0] [IRENA Global Atlas Vision Video]