June 6, 2007—The Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and collaborators have updated the National Solar Radiation Database, a planning tool that provides critical information about the amount of solar energy that is available at any given location.
According to NREL, the database is widely used by solar system designers, building architects and engineers, renewable energy analysts, and others to plan, size, and site solar energy systems.
It provides hourly solar radiation and meteorological data for 1991-2005 for 1,454 stations, and features a new hourly 10-kilometer gridded data set for 1998-2005. This expands the original 1961-1990 database, which contains solar and meteorological data for only 239 stations, according to NREL.
An accompanying report, National Solar Radiation Database 19912005 Update: User’s Manual (.pdf file), provides user instructions and information about the database’s development and data access. The manual also includes a complete list of stations and a data quality summary for each site.
