28 years ago, the NASA Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) project began a collaboration with Natural Resources Canada’s RETScreen Clean Energy Management Software. RETScreen is an energy decision making software and serves as a platform that promotes low-cost energy planning, implementation, monitoring, and reporting, helping its users save a combined total of $20 billion. The software enables more than 950,000 global customers to directly access NASA POWER data, gaining more than 40,000 users every year.
POWER has received more than a million data requests from RETScreen users, averaging 495 requests per day since 2019. POWER provides global data for users to access more than 300 near real-time solar and meteorological parameters and daily historical data dating back to 1981. POWER parameters available through RETScreen include temperature at two meters, minimum and maximum temperature, relative humidity at two meters, all sky surface shortwave downward irradiance, surface pressure, wind speed at 10 meters, Earth skin temperature, precipitation, and atmospheric pressure. The RETScreen Climate Database provides users data from both NASA global satellites and more than 6,700 ground monitoring stations. NASA POWER satellite and modeling data automatically supplements missing or insufficient data from ground monitoring stations, ensuring reliable solar and meteorological data for projects around the world.
The partnership between RETScreen and POWER started after Gregory J. Leng, the creator of the RETScreen software, gave a presentation at a conference in Montreal in 1998 demonstrating the first version of the software. According to Leng himself, the late Dr. Charles Whitlock, former NASA senior atmospheric scientist and program manager of the Surface Meteorology and Solar Energy project (SSE) – the precursor to the POWER project – approached Leng to discuss the solar radiation data NASA has been collecting from its Earth observation satellites. Dr. Whitlock asked Leng if the data would be useful to RETScreen software users, and Leng responded, “Absolutely.”
Dr. Paul Stackhouse worked with Dr. Whitlock and eventually took over as science lead of the POWER project following Dr. Whitlock’s retirement. The partnership between RETScreen and the POWER project continued to grow and evolve under Dr. Stackhouse.
"In almost all projects that use RETScreen, the NASA data is used [in] some fashion, either to help assess...energy efficiency or co-generation projects, or to measure and verify the ongoing energy performance of buildings, factories, and power plants around the world," said Leng.
Wicked Joe, a Maine-based coffee roaster whose coffee is sold in all 50 U.S. states, used POWER data available through the RETScreen software to create a solar wall that helped the company cut nearly $10,000 a year in its warehouse heating costs.
Read more about Wicked Joe’s cost saving, energy resilient use of NASA POWER data: POWER Data Helping to Serve an Affordable Cup of Coffee
POWER and RETScreen plan to remain in a close partnership, with the future showing promising possibilities. The POWER team is working on processing the NASA Earth Exchange Global Daily Downscaled Projections Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (NEX-GDDP-CMIP6) future weather data into its datasets. CMIP6 offers detailed global climate projections that can help assess how climate variabilities might affect local areas with specific terrain or weather conditions – especially where hills, mountains, or valleys influence the weather. RETScreen wants to collaborate with POWER to incorporate the CMIP6 data into the software. Making this data available for its users will allow them to more accurately estimate future weather conditions as they aim to develop climate resilient buildings and energy installations around the world.