3TIER plans the data to be used to aid the UN Sustainable Energy for All initiative, an effort to ensure universal access to modern, sustainable energy, double the rate of improvement of energy efficiency, and double the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix by the year 2030.

“Reliable access to energy is a key driver of economic, political, and social stability,” said Gauri Singh, director of country support and partnerships at IRENA. “Globally over 1.3 billion people are without access to electricity. More than 95% of these people are either in sub-Saharan African or developing Asia and 84% are in rural areas. Updated, high resolution datasets, like 3TIER's, allow countries to do advanced analysis of resource assessment and help guide policy frameworks that promote renewables."

“IRENA provides a wide variety of renewable energy information to support countries in their transition to more sustainable energy sources,” said Adnan Z. Amin, director-general of IRENA. “With the addition of 3TIER’s cohesive and consistent global dataset of wind and solar resources, we now have a much more complete offering that will help move policy and infrastructure planning forward.”

3TIER’s global datasets were originally developed to enable country to continent-scale wind and solar analysis for aggregate research studies looking at the global energy picture and evaluating strategies for a smarter and more sustainable power grid. The annual average maps and underlying datasets make it possible to analyse renewable energy potential, impediments to grid integration, and the pros and cons of various energy policies and incentive programmes. Each dataset offers annual average values derived from weather models of 10 or more years at high spatial resolutions.