Solar + Battery Atlas BETA

The Goal: Can solar panels plus battery storage, on their own, deliver constant round-the-clock "baseload" power 24/7/365 — and at what cost? This tool tests that question at thousands of locations worldwide.

How it works

• Everything is sized per 1 MW of constant, round-the-clock demand, so results scale to any load. You choose how much solar (MW per MW of demand) and battery (MWh per MW of demand) to build.
• We start from a full year of hourly weather data (2024) from NASA POWER for each location.
• For each hour, the local sunlight and temperature are turned into the DC solar output that the chosen solar build would produce.
• An hour-by-hour simulation then dispatches that energy: solar meets demand directly when the sun is up; surplus charges the battery (accounting for round-trip losses); the battery discharges to cover shortfalls; whatever is still unmet is recorded as a gap.
• Across the whole year, this gives each location's Capacity Factor. It is pre-computed offline for 19 solar/battery combinations per location and loaded into your browser, so panning the map is instant.
• LCOE is calculated live in your browser from those capacity factors and your own cost assumptions — change the costs, financing, or year and results update immediately.

Key Metrics

• Capacity Factor (CF): the share of the year that solar + battery keep the baseload fully supplied — the reliability of the system.
• LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy): the average lifetime cost per MWh, accounting for up-front build cost (CAPEX), operating costs (OPEX), financing (WACC), panel degradation, and equipment lifetimes. You can switch between global cost assumptions and local, region-specific costs, roll costs forward to a future year, and optionally add a diesel backup generator to firm up the last few percent of supply.

What you can explore

• Capacity Factor Map: how reliably a chosen solar + battery build can meet the load, everywhere.
• Sample Weeks: replay a representative week hour-by-hour to watch solar output, battery charging/discharging, and any unmet demand.
• Potential Map: how much solar energy each area could realistically generate (PVOUT), under technical land limits or stricter policy limits.
• LCOE Map: the lowest cost to hit a target reliability at each location; compare against a reference location and see the breakeven cost of moving power between them.
• Supply-Demand Matching: line up where solar + storage works against where people live, how much electricity they use, grid reliability and access, and the fossil plants it could displace.

Data Sources

Credits

Created by the Electrotech Revolution team, 2026.