William S. Chandler

NASA Climatological Data for Renewable Energy Assessment

This article presents the latest parameters and delivery methods that provide global solar energy and meteorological resources on the Interuet. Over the past several years the number of parameters in the Surface meteorology and Solar Energy Data Set has tripled. The newest parameters include solar geometry, a suite of wind speed and wind direction data, diffuse, direct normal and tilted surface solar irradiance. Requests by users and recommendations by the renewable energy industry have prompted the growth.

A Global Perspective on Renewable Energy Resources: Nasa’s Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resources (Power) Project

The Prediction of the Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) Project, initiated under the NASA Science Mission Directorate Applied Science Energy Management Program, analyzes, synthesizes and makes available data parameters on a global scale. These data have proved to be reliable and useful to the renewable energy industries, especially to the solar energy sectors. The POWER project derives its data primarily from NASA’s World Climate Research Programme (WCRP)/Global Energy and Water cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Surface Radiation Budget (SRB) project (Version 2.9) and the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) assimilation model (Version 4).

Assessing the socio-economic value of NASA gridded long-term and near-term data sets for the energy sector and other uses

NASA Applied Science Program has and continues to yield significant results for nation and international programs through Science ⇒ Applications transfer; Successes include supporting renewable energy and energy efficient technology optimization and providing data from the individual user to the worldwide scale.; The value of contributions to the renewable energy show wide spread impact, but are difficult to quantify - The Brattle Group has done a preliminary assessment of benefits of the SSE web portal through RETScreen - However, specific knowledge of benefits will have to be collected - Case studies showing example benefits have to be expanded - Strategies for assessing the macro benefit are also needed.