Apr 01, 2008 -- STATE DEPARTMENT RELEASE/ContentWorks

An international program created to help 13 developing nations understand the extent of their solar and wind energy resources is expanding geographically and adding other renewable energy information to its free and growing public database.

The Solar and Wind Energy Resource Assessment (SWERA) program began in 2001 as a $9.1 million pilot project, co-financed with $6.8 million from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), an independent financial organization that helps developing countries fund projects and programs that protect the global environment.

The United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP's) Division of Technology, Industry and Economics manages the program in collaboration with more than 25 partners from around the world, including the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

"It struck us from the very beginning," Mark Radka, chief of the Energy Branch in that UNEP division, told America.gov, "that [countries] need good information about their resources for sensible renewable energy policies in government and on the investment side."

For 13 pilot countries -- Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Cuba, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sri Lanka -- SWERA technical partners took what Radka calls the "critical first step" in creating indigenous renewable enterprises: they produced maps of each country's solar and wind resources.

MAPPING WIND AND SUN

Satellite imagery is critical to assessing each country's wind and solar energy potential. To produce solar maps, scientists used weather satellite imagery to infer a country's resources. To produce wind maps, they used high-resolution imagery and high-quality numerical models of wind flow over complex terrain.

The maps, Dave Renne, principal project leader in NREL's International Programs Group, told America.gov, "were of high enough quality to be favorable for large-scale renewable energy applications. Many of the countries never had that information before, so it was an eye-opening experience and helped accelerate and broaden interest in renewable energy development in the countries."

The technical enterprises of several nations contributed to the SWERA assessment project, especially, in the project's early days, NREL. These included the Ris National Laboratory at the Technical University of Denmark and the German Aerospace Center's Institute of Technical Thermodynamics. SWERA also worked with country partners and local universities and government technical institutes in developing the assessments.

Combining solar and wind data from many different measuring instruments and techniques into a standard product was another goal, Radka said.

Part of the reason SWERA appealed to UNEP, he added, was that it gave the organization "a chance to bring together different schools of thought on how one uses satellite-derived information mainly collected for weather purposes, and come up with a consistent way of using it, even if the satellites are different."

From NREL came a useful innovation: making sure the solar and wind data were compatible with geographic information systems (GIS) -- computer applications used to store, view and analyze geographic information, especially maps. In such digital maps, satellite, aerial photography and other data representing an area's attributes and characteristics can be arranged in layers.

GIS helps organize the SWERA data, and an analysis can tell users, for example, how many square kilometers of a region have certain categories (strengths) of wind within a certain distance from transmission lines, roads and populated areas.

A GLOBAL RESOURCE

The 13-nation pilot project ended in 2006, but SWERA continues as a program whose geographic area and renewable energy interests are expanding.

The program now is working to add data on geothermal and small-scale hydropower energy and, in the future, biomass. It also is looking for funding from governments, international financial institutions, users and others.

As part of its geographic expansion, SWERA is involved in a $15 billion effort announced in January by the government of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates to fund renewable energy infrastructure and related projects in that country, the Middle East/North Africa region and globally.

"We're branching out into other countries," Radka said, "and going into some places where assessments have been conducted and the information exists, but to clean it up and format it and put it into the archive, even if it might not have been done under the original project."

Data are coming in from Morocco and Tunisia, for example, and from work that NREL, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, did in the Philippines and the Dominican Republic.

The SWERA archive is housed at the USGS Earth Resources and Observation Science Data Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, along with a range of computer-based tools -- two developed at NREL and one in Canada -- to help energy planners and developers, policymakers, industry representatives, investors, university researchers and consumers use the resource.

"SWERA helps remove barriers that developing countries in particular may face," Renne said, "in terms of understanding whether they have the resources to support a renewable energy initiative. And it turns out that very often they have more than they think they do."

More information about SWERA is available at the UNEP Web site.

More information about the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is available at the Department of Energy Web site.

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