COPERNICUS AND THE ENERGY CHALLENGE

Abstract. The energy sector will drastically change in the following years; multiple agreements have been signed by countries with the purpose to reduce carbon emission and contain the global temperature increase. Besides, in the next years the energy demand will increase with the growth of the Information and Communications Technology sector. To combine these two aspects, future energy needs to be produced with renewable resources and less with fossil fuels. An opportunity to discover and plan the use of renewable energy resources are geospatial data derived from satellite acquisitions. The European Earth Observation programme Copernicus provides multiple datasets in an Open Science approach. Within this paper, multiple datasets offered by Copernicus services are presented in relation to their exploitation for the energy system analysis, with a particular attention to renewable energy. The datasets will be analysed according to their properties and possibility of usage. Additional Copernicus satellite derived data that can benefit the emerging topic of the food-energy-water nexus are finally presented to point out significant development in the energy sector which is recently claiming growing attention.