Data for the paper « An all-Africa dataset of energy model "supply regions" for solar PV and wind power »

This dataset contains data provided alongside the paper "An all-Africa dataset of energy model “supply regions” for solar PV and wind power". It concerns a novel representative subset of attractive sites for solar PV and onshore wind power for the entire African continent. We refer to these sites as “Model Supply Regions” (MSRs). This MSR dataset was created from an in-depth analysis of various existing datasets on resource potential, grid infrastructure, land use, topography and others (see Methods), and achieves hourly temporal resolution and kilometre-scale spatial resolution. This dataset fills an important research need by closing the gap between comprehensive datasets on African VRE potential (such as the Global Solar Atlas and Global Wind Atlas) on the one hand, and the input needed to run cost-optimisation models on the other. It also allows a detailed analysis of the trade-offs involved in exploiting excellent, but far-from-grid resources as compared to mediocre but more accessible resources, which is a crucial component of power systems planning to be elaborated for many African countries. Three separate datasets are included (as sub-folders of a single .rar file, which can be downloaded below): (1) Country-level visualisations (in the form of maps) of the screened MSRs. We screened the dataset according to the criterion that the total area of screened MSRs should not exceed 5% of an individual country’s surface area. (2) Excel files containing the screened and pre-screened MSRs suggested for model inclusion alongside various metadata. (3) Shapefiles containing the screened MSRs in GIS format.