Solar energy resource assessment - Brazil

Appropriate information on solar resources is very important for a variety of technological areas, such as: agriculture, meteorology, forestry engineering, water resources and particularly for an innovating technology such as solar energy. In the market entry process of an innovating technology such as solar energy, the enlarged and sustained reproduction of this energy strongly depends on the economy and reliability of the demonstrative solar systems installed (within a restricted or wide scale). The economy and reliability of a system are the consequence of a well-prepared project, resulting from an accurate knowledge of the solar resource available. Therefore, knowing the potential of the solar resource accurately is not only a need, it is also an imperative for a larger diffusion and use of the solar energy. The existing sources of information on radiation in Brazil are quite varied, both at the institutional level and in different types of publications. At the institutional level these sources are: the National Institute of Meteorology, secretary of agriculture, research centers, universities, and electric power generating and distributing companies, among others. The publications with this information are project reports, internal reports of institutions or several magazines. Thus, the quality of the data varies considerably, the information presents spatial and temporal discontinuity and the instruments as well as the measurement units are not standardized. The general objective of this paper is to recover, qualify, standardize and make available the best information from the current existing solar resource in Brazil, either in the form of isoline charts of solar radiation, insolation, numeric tables or analytic summaries of a great part of the publications on the theme over the last forty years. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.