World Solar Map

How It Works

The colours

Each cell is three degrees of latitude and longitude, and its number is the electricity one kilowatt of crystalline panels makes in a year at that cell's optimal fixed tilt, facing the equator: kWh per kWp. The figures come from PVGIS, the European Commission's photovoltaic geographical information system, which uses satellite radiation records (SARAH2 and SARAH3 over Europe, Africa and most of Asia; NSRDB over the Americas; ERA5 reanalysis elsewhere), local temperature and wind, and a flat 14% allowance for cables, inverter and soiling. The bands on the panel, from "poor" below 700 to "exceptional" above 1,700, are descriptions of the resource, not buying advice: a panel in the Atacama makes about 2,100 kWh per kWp, one in London about 1,100, and one in Bergen about 730.

The day and night line

The shaded half of the map is where the sun is below the horizon at the time shown, and the yellow dot is the subsolar point, where it is directly overhead. Both are computed in your browser from the NOAA solar position equations (the declination of the sun and the equation of time), so the map is live and you can drag the time forward to watch the line swing through the year: it tilts to 23.4° at the solstices and runs pole to pole at the equinoxes. The same equations give the sunrise and sunset for any point you click, quoted in UTC because the map does not know your time zone.

The plug-in countries

Germany's Balkonkraftwerk rules are the model the rest of Europe has followed: from May 2024 an 800 W inverter with up to 2,000 W of panels, registered in a national database and plugged into a socket. Great Britain adopted an 800 VA socket route on 27 August 2026. Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium all permit some form of plug-in connection, at limits between 600 and 800 W; those entries are marked as reported rather than confirmed, because this site has only checked the German and British texts. What none of those countries has is a sunnier climate than the other: Germany and Britain both sit in the 900 to 1,150 band. The economics of a plug-in kit are made by the price of the electricity it displaces, and Germany and Britain have two of the highest household tariffs in the world.

Worked example

Click Berlin and the cell reads about 1,040 kWh per kWp; click Seville and it reads about 1,610. An 800 W kit makes roughly 830 kWh a year in Berlin and 1,290 in Seville. Berlin's kit is worth more, because a German household pays around twice what a Spanish one does per unit. The plug-in solar savings calculator does the money side for a UK kit; the UK solar map does the same thing as this page at postcode resolution.