Country analysis for solar thermal power stations using remote sensing methods

Identifying the best available sites for the erection of solar thermal power plants is a basic issue of project development. As traditional solutions for this question seem insufficient, the planning tool STEPS was developed at the German Aerospace Center, DLR, to especially meet this demand. The use of remote sensing data in STEPS allows to analyze areas on the country scale exhaustively and in a high resolution (country analysis). Thus a number of significant benefits can be gained, among which a tremendous cost reduction is the most important. In this paper the specific approach of STEPS, the benefits expected by this approach and the broad field of future applications are pointed out.