Data for the paper « An all-Africa dataset of energy model "supply regions" for solar PV and wind power »

This dataset contains data provided alongside the paper "An all-Africa dataset of energy model “supply regions” for solar PV and wind power". 

It concerns a novel representative subset of attractive sites for solar PV and onshore wind power for the entire African continent. We refer to these sites as “Model Supply Regions” (MSRs). This MSR dataset was created from an in-depth analysis of various existing datasets on resource potential, grid infrastructure, land use, topography and others (see Methods), and achieves hourly temporal resolution and kilometre-scale spatial resolution. This dataset fills an important research need by closing the gap between comprehensive datasets on African VRE potential (such as the Global Solar Atlas and Global Wind Atlas) on the one hand, and the input needed to run cost-optimisation models on the other. It also allows a detailed analysis of the trade-offs involved in exploiting excellent, but far-from-grid resources as compared to mediocre but more accessible resources, which is a crucial component of power systems planning to be elaborated for many African countries.

Five separate datasets are included:

(1) 20220412_country_maps.rar: Country-level visualisations (in the form of maps) of the screened MSRs. We screened the dataset according to the criterion that the total area of screened MSRs should not exceed 5% of an individual country’s surface area. See also (3).

(2) 20220412_excel_files.rar: Excel files containing the screened MSRs suggested for model inclusion alongside various metadata. See also (4).

(3) 20220705_clusters_maps.zip: Same as (1), but showing the clusters (formed from individual MSRs) described in the publication. We use an example of clustering down to 10, 5 or 2 clusters per country, depending on country size. The archive also contains Excel files summarising the clusters, including model-ready hourly profiles.

(4) 20220822_excel_files_prescreen.rar: Same as (2), but containing all identified MSRs prior to screening.

(5) 20241127_shapefiles.zip: Shapefiles containing the screened MSRs in GIS format, including the cluster IDs described under (3).