Geographic information systems (GIS) tools in complementarity research—estimation and visualization

As in many other research fields in engineering, energy complementarity studies have benefited from the rapid development of computational tools over the last decades. Geographic information systems (GIS) provide flexible and comprehensive options for the spatial analysis and visualization of different renewable energy features, which is especially interesting for researchers, planners, and policy-makers. This chapter presents a vision of how GIS applications have been utilized for estimating and visualizing energetic complementarity. After presenting the main GIS tools employed in this type of endeavor, the reviewed studies are presented and summarized according to the geographic region of their case study. Our findings indicate that the most common combination of energy sources assessed through GIS corresponds to wind and solar resources. Similarly, correlations are the most prevalent metrics represented and evaluated through maps.