Data Sources and Licences
PVQuick calculates with public data from the organisations below. This page gives the attribution and licence each of them asks for. PVQuick processes the data (multi-year means, splitting global irradiance into direct and diffuse parts, scaling hourly data to the monthly values, clipping and buffering map features); none of these organisations has reviewed or endorsed PVQuick or its results.
1. Weather and solar resource
- NASA POWER (monthly, climatology and daily values: irradiation, air temperature, daily temperature range, wind speed, surface albedo): These data were obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) POWER Project funded through the NASA Earth Science/Applied Science Program. POWER Monthly, Climatology and Daily APIs, power.larc.nasa.gov; licensed under CC BY 4.0; processed by PVQuick (multi-year means, diffuse/beam split).
- Global Solar Atlas (long-term annual global horizontal irradiation, used to scale the NASA POWER monthly distribution): Solar resource data © 2026 Solargis. Global Solar Atlas 2.0, a free, web-based application, is developed and operated by the company Solargis s.r.o. on behalf of the World Bank Group, utilizing Solargis data, with funding provided by the Energy Sector Management Assistance Program (ESMAP). globalsolaratlas.info; licensed under CC BY 4.0; processed by PVQuick (one value per site read from the long-term map).
- PVGIS (hourly typical meteorological year outside the Americas): PVGIS © European Communities, 2001-2026, European Commission Joint Research Centre, PVGIS 5.3, joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/pvgis. In Europe, Africa and western Asia the irradiance comes from the SARAH-3 satellite data record of EUMETSAT CM SAF; elsewhere PVGIS uses ERA5 reanalysis: Generated using Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026. Neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use that may be made of the Copernicus information or data it contains. ERA5 is licensed under CC BY 4.0. PVQuick scales each month of the hourly data to the monthly table of the Location step and uses the hourly data only for how the month is spread over the hours.
- NSRDB (hourly typical meteorological year in the Americas): National Solar Radiation Database, National Laboratory of the Rockies (formerly the National Renewable Energy Laboratory), GOES v4 TMY, nsrdb.nrel.gov; Sengupta, M., Xie, Y., Lopez, A., Habte, A., Maclaurin, G., Shelby, J. (2018), The National Solar Radiation Data Base (NSRDB), Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 89, 51–60. Processed by PVQuick as above. No endorsement by the Laboratory or the U.S. Department of Energy is implied.
2. Terrain, water and land cover
- Copernicus DEM (elevation, slope, steep-slope keep-out zones, 3D terrain): produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 © DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved. The organisations in charge of the Copernicus programme by law or by delegation do not incur any liability for any use of the Copernicus WorldDEM-30.
- ESA WorldCover (built-up areas used as keep-out zones): © ESA WorldCover project 2021 / Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021) processed by ESA WorldCover consortium; licensed under CC BY 4.0; PVQuick extracts the built-up class (50) from it.
- JRC Global Surface Water (water bodies used as keep-out zones): Source: EC JRC/Google. Pekel, J.-F., Cottam, A., Gorelick, N., Belward, A. S. (2016), High-resolution mapping of global surface water and its long-term changes, Nature 540, 418–422.
- OpenStreetMap (place search, water bodies, rivers and land-cover features): © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL), openstreetmap.org/copyright. Place search uses the Nominatim service; water and land-cover features are queried through the Overpass API. PVQuick clips and buffers these features and merges them with the satellite water layer.
- Elevation lookups: Open-Elevation (open-elevation.com) and the U.S. Geological Survey Elevation Point Query Service (public domain).
3. Maps
Street and satellite maps in the software are loaded from Esri; the attribution of each map is shown on the map itself (Powered by Esri).
4. Electricity tariffs
U.S. tariff templates use the U.S. Utility Rate Database on OpenEI (openei.org), provided by the National Laboratory of the Rockies; no endorsement is implied. Chinese time-of-use periods and agency purchase prices are taken from the published documents of the provincial authorities and grid companies.
5. Photographs in reports
- Azimuth tracking: Vitor Oliveira, “Central Solar Fotovoltaica de Amareleja - Portugal”, flickr.com/photos/vitor107/3365791344, CC BY-SA 2.0; resized and cropped.
- Two-axis tracking (GHC): Pmau, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fourcatier-et-Maison-Neuve_-_img_50048.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0; resized and cropped.
- Solar street light: U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Aubry L. Buzek, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USMC-090109-M-5451B-026.jpg (public domain). The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.
- Fixed arrays: Michael Foertsch (CC0); horizontal single-axis tracking: Msrt10 (public domain); sloped roof: Aethonatic (CC0); all via Wikimedia Commons.
6. Questions
If you are a rights holder and think an attribution here is missing or wrong, please write to support@pvquick.com.