Solar Energy Resource Management for Electricity Generation : From Local Level to Global Scale

This book addresses the rapid developments in the new field of solar resource knowledge as a reflection of growing needs of management of renewable energy resources. The authors have structured the content of this work as a set of contributions from the research, international and commercial institutions. The chapters discuss the availability of new primary data, basic concepts of research trends and approaches developed for providing higher resolution data and value-added products in an operational mode. Based on the experience from commercial and aid-providing sphere, individual and more generic barriers have been identified and solutions for overcoming them are discussed. The approaches exploiting geographical information systems, integrating spatial data and methods, outline directions for decision-making and management of distributed energy systems, considering regional and time variability at various hierarchical scales. The final contributions point out that the recent developments gave an impetus for complementing the traditional applications of Earth observation data by renewable energy programs.