# Renewables

Renewable commodities other than biomass can only be used in the [power sector](../energy-sectors/supply/power-sector.md), [commercial sector](../energy-sectors/commercial.md), and [residential sector](../energy-sectors/residential.md). For each one them, the installed capacities in the base year (2018) are estimated according to the IEA Energy Balance (2020). Future potentials for wind, solar, and hydro are estimated based on (NEA, 2015). For geothermal energy and tide & wave energies, there are no potentials specified but the deployment of technologies employing these energies is limited in the [power sector](../energy-sectors/supply/power-sector.md).

## Wind, solar & hydro

Detailed country-level potentials for onshore and offshore wind, photovoltaic, and hydro capacity are used.

Wind potentials are segmented by resource class, distance from transmission, and, for offshore wind, depth. Each country-level segment features a specific cost, resulting in a detailed global wind supply curve.
PV potential is similarly segmented by resource class within each country. 
Hourly wind and solar generation profiles for each country were developed from geospatial solar and wind speed data. These are aggregated into the model timeslices.

Hydro is specified by a three-step cost supply curve. Country-level availability factors constrain hydro production at the annual and seasonal level, based
upon historic seasonal generation where available, or seasonal precipitation data. Moderate (20%) additional seasonal flexibility is provided to represent the capacity for reservoirs to allow seasonal shifting of production.
All these options for new renewable installations are tracked at the country level, regardless of regional aggregation, to maintain the granularity of the resource supply curve and prevent resources from supplying inappropriately distant load without incurring transmission costs.

## Geothermal energy

No potentials are explicitly specified.

## Tide and wave

No potentials are explicitly specified.

**References**

IEA, 2020. World Energy Balances - Data product [WWW Document]. IEA. URL https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-product/world-energy-balances (accessed 11.16.22).  
NEA (2015), Projected Costs of Generating Electricity - 2015 Edition, OECD Publishing, Paris  
NREL, 2014. Open Energy Data Initiative (OEDI) [WWW Document]. OpenEI. URL https://data.openei.org/ (accessed 6.4.24).