Resources for CMU's systems synthesis team working on a solar study for the State of PA.
GIS Best Practices for Renewable Energy (ESRI white paper)
PVWatts Calculator: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov
Search a given location against the National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB) to calculates hourly or monthly energy production based on information you provide.
System Advisor Model (SAM): https://sam.nrel.gov/
Using performance and financial inputs, model a project based on location, components of a system, operating costs and other financial assumptions. More details can be found in the documentation.
NREL Solar Data: https://www.nrel.gov/gis/data-solar.html
Geodatabases, shapefiles and Google Earth compatible files (KMZ) can be found here.
NREL Data Visualization and Geospatial Tools: https://www.nrel.gov/gis/tools.html
An excellent selection of tools, data and other resources.
Crowdsourced information from a variety of sources, also maintained by NREL.
Renewables.ninja: https://www.renewables.ninja/
Allows users to input a given location and determine energy output based on a series of sysetm variables. Map-based.
Also has example in R using their API and an Excel interface. https://www.renewables.ninja/news/new-r-and-excel-interfaces
State-level reports and high-level statistics can be found here, and the PA page is here.
Not clear what the value is here in terms of available data, but there are a handful of CONUS maps that might be generally useful.
They also provide their own tool called iMaps: https://solargis.info/imaps/
World Bank's Global Solar Atlas: http://globalsolaratlas.info/
Built in collaboration with the folks at Solar-GIS - this version is freely available.