Implementation of a GEOdatabase to administrate global energy resources

The future development of our energy system is still unclear. This uncertainty is based on numerous aspects. In addition to the currently most relevant climate debate this will also be a question of available technologies as well as of available resources. Hence the global energy resources and their distribution will be one of the most influencing factors in the design of our future energy system. To model and administrate global energy potentials a geographical (GEO) database has been implemented. The intention to implement such a global GEO database is based on the fact that numerous aspects describing our energy system rely on spatial characteristics. Particularly renewable energy resources depend on numerous datasets, the most important ones are topography, land cover, climate, population distribution and precipitation. With respect to these datasets the theoretical and furthermore useable global potentials of renewable energy carriers were estimated, in this paper the computation of wind power is shown exemplarily. When modelling renewable energy potentials special attention has to be paid to the fact that renewable energy potentials are often not additive, what means that the land surface is only available once and therefore several potentials exclude the option to yield another potential on the same area. For the estimation of the highest possible energy potential on a certain area, a competition analysis regarding the utilization of the land surface was carried out.