A while back I was curious about how renewable energy varies by region.
After checking several data providers, I was unsatisfied with how the numbers were presented, so I decided to build something that felt clearer and more interactive.
That’s how Solar Atlas was born.

I wanted to compare a location’s solar potential with its household electricity needs.
The plan was simple gather energy-related datasets, relate them to average family size in each country, and display everything in a simple, stylish and intuitive way

Data Sources

• Family size by country: UN Household Size & Composition
• Population: World Bank – Total Population
• Energy consumption per capita: World Bank – Electricity Use
• Solar intensity & daylight: NASA POWER API

How It Works

I aggregated the public datasets, exported them as CSV, and imported everything into a SQLite database.
When a user clicks a point on the map:

1. The app captures the latitude and longitude.
2. It queries the NASA POWER API for solar duration and intensity at that exact spot.
3. Using the same coordinates, it identifies the country, pulls the matching row from SQLite, and combines the results.
4. Users can optionally enter the number of solar panels they own or the amount of power they want to generate to get tailored estimates.

Reflection

It meets my own needs for quick, location-specific insight, but there’s plenty of room for refinement.
I plan to keep improving it better caching, richer seasonal data, maybe even a PostGIS backend for more advanced spatial queries.