Solar energy Availability by Geographic Location and Month

[BroncoLera]

Hi,
I travel quite a bit and often carry solar panels, batteries and controllers with me to set up temporary power at locations with no grid power.

What I am looking for is data that can remove the guesswork and give me actual data that shows the expected average maximum solar energy available for harvest by Month and by Geographic location in kWh per square meter. This might be a bit much to ask but I was wondering if any such data exists.

Is this the best and most accurate data available?

https://www.solar-electric.com/learning-center/solar-insolation-maps.html/

Thanks

[J.P.M.]

Such wonderful data does exist, in several forms.

The most complete, useful and strict answer to your question, but not necessarily the simplest data set to use is something from NREL called the TMY, or Typical meteorological Year. It is 8,640 hours of representative (not "average") horizontal irradiance and other weather data for several hundred locations in the U.S. It's online and has a manual which is quite informative and probably necessary reading to be able to get the most from the data.

Another useful and perhaps more practical tool also from NREL is something called PVWatts. It's a user friendly design model for residential PV systems.
Just read all the help screens a couple of times, get your array orientations as close as possible to what you have in mind and make a few runs.
FWIW, using a 10% system loss parameter rather than the 14 % the model defaults to seems to get a closer match to actual outputs vs. what the model spits out for many users.

PVWatts, BTW, uses the TMY data for its irradiance input. Since it the TMY uses "typical" and mostly modeled (for ~ 95% of the stations) - not actual irradiance data - PVWatts isn't much use for daily predictions of solar device output, but it probably has some predictive use for clear days.