Global, country-level installable capacity, annual generation, costs and hourly capacity factors of power generation, calculated for the NoRaLock project.

This data set contains cost-potential-curves of renewable power generation in the years 2030, 2040 and 2050, worldwide (256 countries/regions), as well as power generation time series with hourly resolution for each cost category.

The term “potential” is used here to describe maximum nominal capacities and corresponding annual power generation of a technology that can be installed considering area suitability and availability. The potentials have been calculated with EnDAT (Energy Data Analysis Tool), a tool initiated at the German Aerospace Center DLR by (Scholz 2012), globally extended by (Stetter 2014) and maintained and further developed for this data publication. All input data sets are described in the Metadata files. All parameter assumptions have been harmonized within the NoRaLock project and are listed in file EnDAT_Para_NoRaLock_20250407.csv.

The data were calculated within the NoRaLock project, funded by BMWK, FKZ 03EI1054C. The considered technologies are (technology identifiers in parentheses):

• onshore wind turbines ("wind_onshore")
• offshore wind turbines with fixed foundation ("wind_offshore_foundation")
• offshore floating wind turbines ("wind_offshore_floating")
• rooftop photovoltaic ("pv_rooftop")
• open area photovoltaic with fixed mounting, facing south on the northern hemisphere and facing north on the southern hemisphere ("pv_open_area_fixed_S")
• parabolic trough concentrating solar power, mounted in Nort-South-direction and tracked east-west ("csp_parabolic_trough_NS"). In case of csp, thermal capacity and heat generation of the solar field is provided.

The data are generated using the Energy Data Analysis Tool EnDAT, developed at DLR (see Scholz 2012, http://dx.doi.org/10.18419/opus-2015) and additional python scripts for deriving costs and installed capacities and time series for cost categories.

EnDAT uses open data sets of land availability and area suitability factors to assess the areas that are usable for each of the investigated technologies. These spatial input data sets are:

• land cover (Copernicus Global Land Service: Land Cover 100m: collection 3 : epoch 2015: Globe, https://zenodo.org/records/3243509)
• elevation and bathymetry (GEBCO_2021_Grid, https://www.gebco.net/data_and_products/historical_data_sets/#gebco_2021)
• protected areas (World Database on Protected Areas WDPA, https://www.protectedplanet.net/en/thematic-areas/wdpa?tab=WDPA)
• average resource quality (GWA 3.0, https://globalwindatlas.info/en/)
• distance to coast (Distance to the Nearest Coast, https://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/resources/docs/distfromcoast/)
• sand dunes (GSDS30, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10441041)
• glaciers (PCT_GLACIER_2020_1k_c230606 aus LULC: land use and land cover parameters, https://zenodo.org/records/10815170)
• exclusive economic zones (World EEZ v11, https://www.marineregions.org/downloads.php)
• wetlands (Global Lakes and Wetlands Database (GLWD) v2, https://www.hydrosheds.org/products/glwd)

For more information on the input data sets, see the metadata descriptions in Open Energy Metadata format which are part of the data package.

The meteorological data used in the NoRaLock project is the reanalysis dataset ERA5 from ECMWF (ERA5 hourly data on single levels from 1940 to present, https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.adbb2d47). The data are available globally with a spatial resolution of ~31km and a temporal resolution of 1h. ERA5 is a further development of the ERA-Interim reanalysis, However, concerning wind speeds, its relatively coarse resolution is a course of error as well as an additional bias especially over mountainous terrain. Therefore, the data were downscaled and bias corrected using data from the global wind atlas (GWA 3.0, see above) as a reference. The parameters and their values used in EnDAT are listed in the file EnDAT_Para_NoRaLock_20250407.xlsx .

The potential of each considered renewable energy technology is calculated on a raster cell basis. From this information, levelized costs of electricity (LCOE) can be derived using assumptions on power plant investment and operation costs. The potentials are aggregated in LCOE categories of size 10€/MWh for each country (max: 1000€/MWh). LCOE categories always (also in the case of csp) refer to electrical generation. They also always refer to the country-wise cost categories of the year 2050; i.e., the cost categories are kept constant also for the years 2030 and 2040.

EnDAT provides hourly capacity factors as a standard output, but aggregated on a user-defined regional level, not on a raster cell level. Therefore, to calculate hourly capacity factors for each LCOE category, EnDAT is run again using the raster cells belonging to the different LCOE categories as regions for which the hourly output is provided. To do this, the raster cell aggregation from the year 2050 is used for 2030 and 2040, too, to keep the regional reference identical. This can result in LCOE in the years 2030 and 2040 that differ slightly from the LCOE categories, as the LCOE values are calculated for the corresponding year, while the categories refer to the year 2050.

The following files for the years 2030, 2040 and 2050 ({year}) and the above mentioned technologies ({technology_identifier}) are part of this data set:

• Cost-potential-curves: {technology_identifier}_costs_4NRL_{year}.csv
• Capacity factors: {technology_identifier}_cf_4NRL_{year}.csv
• Regions: {technology_identifier}_regions_4NRL.csv
• Region’s mapping: {technology_identifier}_regions_4NRL_mapping.csv
• Technological and economic parameters: EnDAT_Para_NoRaLock_20250407.xlsx
• Metadata: Each of the above mentioned files has its own metadata entry, merged in the file oemetadata.json