Open ELYAS renewable energy potential dataset for wind and photovoltaics

This data set contains renewable power generation time series and capacities with hourly for different renewable technologies for the year 2018. 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.

The data were calculated within the ELYAS project, funded by BMWK, FKZ 03EI1053B. The considered technologies are (technology identifiers in parentheses):

• onshore wind turbines with wind cluster 0-33% (wind_onshore_1),
• onshore wind turbines with wind cluster 33-66% (wind_onshore_2),
• onshore wind turbines with wind cluster 66-100% (wind_onshore_3),
• 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),
• open area photovoltaic with single axis tracking, moving in north south direction (pv_open_area_single_axis_NS),
• open area photovoltaic with single axis tracking, moving in north south direction with additional tilt axis (pv_open_area_single_axis_NS_tilt),
• open area photovoltaic with single axis tracking, moving in east west direction (pv_open_area_single_axis_EW)

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)

EnDAT uses open data sets of land availability and area suitability factors to assess the areas that are usable for each of the wind and pv 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/), 
• exclusive economic zones (World EEZ v11, https://www.marineregions.org/downloads.php),
• mining (Global-scale mining polygons v1, https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.910894), 
• wetland (GLOBAL LAKES AND WETLANDS DATABASE, https://www.worldwildlife.org/publications/global-lakes-and-wetlands-database-lakes-and-wetlands-grid-level-3),
• salt and ice (Digital Soil Map of the World, http://www.fao.org/geonetwork/srv/en/metadata.show?id=14116)

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 for the wind and pv technologies in the ELYAS 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, which should be considered in the results. The potential of each considered renewable energy technology is calculated on a raster cell basis. EnDAT provides hourly capacity factors as a standard output, but aggregated on a user-defined regional level, not on a raster cell level.

The following files for the year 2018 and the above mentioned technologies ({technology_identifiers}) are part of this data set:

• Capacity factors: cf_{technology_identifier}_ELYAS_{year}.csv
• Installable capacities: installable_capacity_{technology_identifier}_ELYAS_{unit}.csv
• Metadata: Each of the above mentioned files has its own metadata entry, merged in the file oemetadata.json.

The data are supposed to be published on the Open Energy Platform (OEP).