Now live in CEAtlas: global wind and solar LCOE, built from the ground up

A strong wind or solar resource gets a site onto the shortlist. What the project costs also depends on how far it is from a usable grid connection and what the ground under it will take. CEAtlas now maps both. The Site Value layer gives indicative onshore wind and solar PV LCOE on an approximately 1 km grid worldwide. In the United States, Great Britain and Europe, two more layers price the site itself: Site Development Cost covers grid connection, access road and civil works, and Civil Works Adders shows what the ground adds.

The full demonstration, 2 minutes 48 seconds. It’s silent, with on-screen explanations, and was recorded in October 2026 on cost book 2026-10d and civil-works edition civil-2026-10a.

The resource underneath

Site Value starts from the CEAtlas capacity-factor record: 86 years of modelled hourly wind and solar from ERA5, the same record behind the free resource explorer. For this layer it is sharpened to about 1 km with textures from the Global Wind Atlas 3 and the Global Solar Atlas 2. The sharpening adds spatial detail. It doesn't turn a reanalysis into kilometre-scale observations, and the record is modelled history. No site has 86 years of measurements behind it.

Wind uses an IEC class 2 reference turbine, and the solar case in the film is single-axis tracking. Where the resource data give a peak that is implausible for a 50 MW plant, capacity factors are capped at 70% for wind and 43% for solar, and the click says when that has happened. Lakes and permanent ice are blanked.

What a megawatt-hour costs to generate

Equipment capex and fixed O&M come from NREL’s Annual Technology Baseline 2025 (Moderate case, land-based wind class 4 and utility PV class 4, in 2023 dollars). ATB’s average grid-connection cost is taken out, because CEAtlas prices the connection separately. Only the labour share moves with local prices: US state factors inside the United States and World Bank price levels everywhere else. Every cell uses the same financing, a 7% real discount rate over 30 years.

Treat the result as a consistent global reference. Local contractor quotes and equipment prices will differ from it.

Generation and connection, kept apart

The floating legend has four views. Cheaper, Wind and Solar colour the map by generation cost alone. Connection shows the separate adder for whichever technology Cheaper picks at that cell. Click anywhere for each technology’s generation cost, connection or site-works adder, indicative total, range and capacity factor. Land comes as its own line where the land model has a value.

The film stops at one site in Great Britain to show why the split matters.

Values as displayed in the CEAtlas popup recorded for the demonstration, October 2026 release. They are one site’s model outputs. They don’t describe GB wind or solar in general, and they aren’t a quote.

Site works add 43% to wind’s generation cost at this site and 62% to solar’s. The site-works bill itself is about the same for the two 50 MW projects here. Solar spreads it over roughly a third as many megawatt-hours, so its adder per MWh comes out about three times wind’s.

The range runs from cheaper site works at the low end to dearer site works in a P90 resource year at the top. It shows how far those two assumptions move the figure. It isn’t a confidence interval for project cost or returns.

What the connection figure includes

In the United States, Great Britain and Europe, the adder is the Site Development Cost model’s site works for a 50 MW reference project: grid connection, access road and civil works, with land separate. Wider network reinforcement is left out, because the map doesn’t test whether a new connection fits within local headroom.

Elsewhere the adder covers the connection only. It runs to the nearest tappable AC line or substation at 110 kV or above (lines up to 800 kV; HVDC links and converter stations are excluded) and is priced with European unit costs transferred across. It carries lower confidence and includes no access road, civil works or land. The Connection view hatches cells with no reachable grid at a suitable voltage over land in the detailed regions, and cells with no qualifying line or substation within about 300 km elsewhere. A few edge and coastal cells inside the detailed regions fall outside the site-works grid and use the connection-only estimate, and the click labels them.

So a step in the adder at a regional boundary can come from what is counted on each side. It doesn’t necessarily mean the ground or prices change there.

Site development: four reference projects

The Site Development Cost layer breaks site works into their parts. The grid connection is priced as the cheaper of a bay at the nearest substation or a new substation on the nearest line, along a least-cost route. The access road runs from the nearest paved public road. Civil works come from the ground model below. Land is shown separately where it is available, and equipment isn’t in this total.

One click gives the figures for four reference projects at the same location: 50 MW solar PV, 50 MW onshore wind, 100 MW / 400 MWh battery storage and a 100 MW IT data centre. Batteries and data centres have no capacity factor here, so they get site costs and no LCOE.

What the ground adds

Civil Works Adders maps ground-related costs on about 1 km cells across the US, GB and Europe. It prices:

• Earthworks on the project’s own footprint. Solar benches on the cell’s share of 5–10° slopes; pads for wind, batteries and data centres sized to the slope. The road and grid-route estimates price their own slopes, so nothing is counted twice.
• Raised pads for solar and wind in mapped 1-in-100 flood areas. Batteries and data centres stay excluded from those areas. The model doesn’t price them as flood-adapted projects.
• Foundation premiums for mapped ground issues: shallow bedrock, soft ground, peat, shrink-swell clay, karst, landslides, coal-mining high-risk areas, historical mines, landfill and contaminated land.
• Off-site disposal where landfill or contaminated land is mapped.
• Ground investigation and a ground-risk contingency, both adjusted by public borehole evidence. Class A means a record within 1 km. Class B means one within 5 km where Class A doesn’t apply.

At the GB cell shown in the film, the map flags soft or compressible ground and peat, and the nearest public borehole record is 0.9 km away, so Class A applies. Civil works for the 50 MW onshore wind project there come to £104/kW, or £5.2m, with a range of £2.6m to £10m. The 50 MW solar case is £26/kW. A nearby borehole is evidence about the area. It isn’t a ground investigation of your parcel.

Civil works already sit inside Site Development Cost’s site works, from the 14 October 2026 edition. Don’t add them again on top. The map colours show civil works per kW for the 50 MW solar reference, and the click gives all four projects.

Free preview and Analyst

Without a subscription the layers still draw at about 1 km, in ten relative classes with no numbers. The LCOE preview uses one worldwide scale, lighter for cheaper. The civil-works preview uses one scale across its three regions. Analyst and above add the numbers: map values, legend scales and the click-through breakdowns shown in the film.

To cost a specific site line by line, draw its boundary with the parcel tool. That step isn’t shown in the film. Analyst comes with a 14-day trial, and plans are on the pricing page.

What these estimates leave out

These are indicative screening figures. They aren’t a construction quote, a grid-connection offer, a PPA price, a geotechnical assessment or a bankable energy-yield report. Subsidies, tax credits, curtailment, network charges, balancing costs and wider network reinforcement are all excluded. Map resolution says nothing on its own about local accuracy. The release is static, so it won’t follow construction prices as they move.

The global LCOE colours share one US-dollar scale, with euro and pound values converted on the ECB 2025 basis for colouring. Clicks report dollars in the US, pounds in GB, euros in Europe and dollars elsewhere. The currency conversion doesn’t adjust ATB’s 2023 dollars for cost year. Price levels use the World Bank WDI PPP conversion factor divided by the official exchange rate, with regional or world medians filling missing and out-of-range values. They’re modelled adjustments and say nothing certain about local construction costs.

Start with a site you already know. The free preview needs no card.