Global solar and wind atlas
Last week, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) announced the launch of a new online atlas with solar and wind data. When completed, the atlas will be accessible at no charge and target investors and policymakers looking for suitable sites.
At the 3rd Meeting of the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM3), which took place in London on April 25-26, IRENA presented the project, which will collate data from existing databases to produce a global atlas from a single source. The platform had already been presented, however, such as in January here. No date was given for completion in IRENA's announcement, but the organization says that a number of countries will be contributing data, and the platform will be open to the public.
On its website, Germany's DLR explains that it will also be providing sensing data via satellite. A comparison of the wordings in the two press releases is interesting in that IRENA mainly talks about the atlas in the future tense, whereas DLR makes it sound like the project is ready to go but could also be continually updated. Whatever the case, neither organization provides a link for the platform, and the URL given in the video included in both of the press releases (http://www.irena.org/atlas/) leads to a page under construction.
Once the platform gets going, it could finally put IRENA in the foreground as a source of information for renewables. Launched in 2009, the organization has mainly drawn attention to itself for all of the trouble it has had getting started. Last April, IRENA held its first general assembly, which was largely concerned with specifying who was to be the first elected director-general after the first one stepped down in protest. (Craig Morris)
