The World Bank, in partnership with the International Solar Alliance (ISA), launched the Global Solar Atlas, a free, web-based tool to help investors and policymakers identify potential sites for solar power generation virtually anywhere in the world, at the click of a button.

The tool displays annual average solar power potential, and has the capacity to zoom into areas in great detail (with a spatial resolution of 1 km, or 0.6 of a mile). The tool also provides access to high resolution global and regional maps and geographic information system (GIS) data, enabling users to print poster maps and utilize the data in other applications.

This will help governments save millions of dollars on their own research and provide investors and solar developers with an easily accessible and uniform platform to compare resource potential between sites in one region or across multiple countries.

The Atlas was unveiled at an ISA event at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi. It serves as an example of the World Bank’s commitment to ISA and to scaling up renewable energy in client countries.