Wind and solar capacity factor time series by year and grid cell over the contiguous U.S.

This data set contains hourly capacity factor time series of wind and solar resources over the contiguous U.S. The included time series cover four individual years and 2,586 grid cells. The years range from 2016 to 2019. The grid cells correspond to the grid cells of the NASA's MERRA-2 reanalysis data set into which the contiguous U.S. is subdivided. The grid cells have a spatial resolution of 0.5° latitude x 0.625° longitude with dimensions ranging from about 55 km x 45 km to 55 km x 62 km. This data set is used to generate the results of the following journal article: Enrico G. A. Antonini, Tyler H. Ruggles, David J. Farnham, Ken Caldeira, "The quantity-quality transition in the value of expanding wind and solar power generation", iScience 25 (4), 104140, 2022. Code and instructions required to reproduce the results reported in the above paper are available in the GitHub repositories at https://github.com/eantonini/Distributed_wind_and_solar_generation and https://github.com/carnegie/MEM_public/tree/Antonini_et_al_2022.