Even if a location doesn't show high potential, it shouldn't matter.

Solar panels are dirt cheap, just put up more of them. With plug-in solar, rooftop solar and vertical solar, there can be enough production.

If all buildings in a city start producing, we eliminate a third of the cost of grid. Transmission network is not needed (or doesn't need to grow) we produce energy where we consume, in every city. Transmission networks are costly and time consuming. Vertical solar will get us there. Vertical solar will be the cheapest form of energy, because it can use the structural elements already on a building (no need of , adds ~4 hours of production (same as adding batteries, could be cheaper?). Vertical solar can immediately be deployed as fence, we have some kind of wall/fence between buildings everywhere.

Europe is the only place which shows a little less potential. They can build solar farms in Spain, Turkey, North Africa and add transmission lines.

Europe has very high per capita income and colonial wealth, from Roman Empire, Vikings, Portugese, Spanish Empire, English Empire, Dutch and French colonies. With that level of income and wealth, adding dirt cheap solar panels, a bit more to account for lower production should not be a big deal.

Farmers in Europe should ask for solar subsides: shade for their livestock, grow crops that grow better in shade, grow tropical crops using solar energy in greenhouses, harvest both solar and crops.

Give farmers subsidies to harvest solar instead of [ethanol|biodiesel|biofuels|biomass] (garbage ideas, some posted recently about UK subsidizing biomass, which ships wood from Canada). Millions of acres of land can be used for both solar and livestock or crops. Freeing up the land from bio-nonsense-ideas will lower the cost of food and meat.

Canada also looks okay, the only country that can't go solar is Russia. Low solar potential, but also the Govt may not be too keen on Solar.

In the long run, there will be only two fossil fuel countries: US and Russia. The two great superpowers.

Here's the tool I use for estimating solar performance: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/#api_5.3

It's also includes historic weather patterns and has some simple modeling tools built into it that can help predict how well off grid, grid tied and hybrid solar systems will perform. So far I have found that it's predictions map very closely to what I've experienced on the ground with my solar array.

I thought this was very interesting - there's the map upfront, but you can also drill into individual countries and regions with some nice tables. Some "obvious" things here, though a few surprises:

* The solar potential of a gloomy, northern locale like the UK is "only" half of somewhere sunny like Australia. Though I can imagine the swings between seasons are greater.

* Northern Canada has a surprising amount of potential, compared to European regions at the same latitude

Places with most potential:

Australia (all of it!)

Most of South America: Chile (darkest on the map!), Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil.

Mexico and Cuba (everywhere), all of Central America

Western US

Africa (everywhere) Middle East (everywhere) Mongolia, North and Western China, Tibet

Why did it need to hijack my back button...

These kinds of maps are very misleading. They show averages, and the averages rarely drive the costs - somebody in this thread already noted that Australia is only 2x better than the UK.

The main killer of solar is variability. Northern countries have shorter solar days during winter and can have _weeks_ of overcast days, so these countries would need some kind of backup: either long-term storage, or nuclear.

I used them while designing my system. Just checked the numbers again against last 365 days - 97.5% accurate. Previous check I did year ago - I think it was more like 99.9% accurate.