A team of developers from the Imperial College London and ETH Zurich created an online calculator to be able to calculate the estimated output of solar and wind energy. There is a global data base available and more detailed for the European region. The tool can be used worldwide for free and it is a great opportunity for all planners of solar and wind power plants.

The site only is available in English language.
Here is the link to the online calculator from Renewables Ninja.

The German power supplier RWE uses this data for the calculation of their wind power farms since a long time.

The model uses 30 years of weather observation from organisations such as NASA, to predict the wind speed likely to influence turbines and the sunlight likely to strike solar panels at any point on the Earth during the year.

Dr Staffell said he spent two years crunching the data for his own research and thought that creating this tool would make it quicker for others to answer important questions: "Modelling wind and solar power is very difficult because they depend on complex weather systems. Getting data, building a model and checking that it works well takes a lot of time and effort," he said. "If every researcher has to create their own model when they start to investigate a question about renewable energy, a lot of time is wasted. So we built our models so they can be easily used by other researchers online, allowing them to answer their questions faster, and hopefully to start asking new ones."

He and Dr. Pfenninger have been beta testing Renewables.ninja for six months and now have users from 54 institutions across 22 countries, including the European Commission and the International Energy Agency.

(source: imperial.ac.uk)