reV
The reV model is a first-of-its-kind detailed spatio-temporal modeling assessment tool that empowers users to calculate energy capacity, generation, and cost based on geospatial intersection with grid infrastructure and land-use characteristics.
NLR developed the reV model to help utility planners, regional and national agencies, project and land developers, and researchers assess energy resource potential. Available as open source since February 2020, the reV model currently supports hydrothermal and enhanced geothermal systems, data centers, solar photovoltaics (including utility-scale, distributed, and floating), concentrating solar power, land-based and offshore wind technologies, and pumped storage hydropower. The tool can model a single site up to an entire continent at temporal resolutions ranging from five minutes to hourly, spanning a single year or multiple decades.
By automating access to resource data at unprecedented scale, fidelity, and flexibility, the reV model integrates formerly disparate analysis frameworks in the fields of resource modeling, technical potential, and energy cost supply curves.
The reV model currently provides broad coverage across North America, South and Central Asia, the Middle East, South America, and South Africa to inform national- and international-scale analyses as well as regional infrastructure and deployment planning.
How the Model Works
The reV model includes highly dynamic, user-defined modules that function at different spatial and temporal resolutions, allowing users to assess resource potential, technical potential, and supply curves at varying levels of detail. This modular architecture can execute all or parts of the project pipeline and allow for custom inputs to any of the modules. The modular approach allows for various useful products at the ends of each discrete module for different analyses, including interannual variability of energy resources, impacts of varying land-use constraints on installable capacity, effects of grid-distance on the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), and more.
Modeling System Performance
Coupled with NLR's System Advisor Model, the reV model's generation module estimates technology-specific system performance based on user-defined parameters, such as geothermal system configurations (e.g., type of system, number of wells, drilling depths), solar system design (e.g., array racking type, inverter load ratio) and wind plant configuration (e.g., hub height, rotor diameter, power curve).
The reV model simultaneously reads up to tens of terabytes of spatially resolved resource data, including temperature at depth for geothermal or time-series solar or wind data (e.g., from the National Solar Radiation Database or the Wind Integration National Dataset Toolkit).
Calculating Site-Based Levelized Cost of Energy
The reV model estimates the LCOE for a site, which represents the average price per unit of electricity generated, based on capital and operating expenditures. Spatially resolved estimates to provide insight into relative economic competitiveness and regional differences driven both by resource and cost assumptions.
Considering Land Use Characteristics
reV considers technical and sociopolitical limitations to land access for energy projects. This includes technical barriers (e.g., water bodies, steep terrain), regulatory restrictions (e.g., ordinances, federal, state, or local protected land, urban and suburban areas, protected wildlife species habitat), or stakeholder constraints (e.g., U.S. Forest Service lands, Department of Defense lands, and private conservation areas).
This analysis brings to light the land access limitations that can be experienced by energy project developers, thereby helping developers to focus on areas that have a greater potential for successful deployment of new capacity.
Cost and Capacity
Leveraging the capacity, generation and siting considerations, reV applies a spatial optimization algorithm that sorts developable locations based on both site-based LCOE and transmission access. Taking into account required gen-tie spur-lines and network upgrades, the algorithm calculates the grid interconnection costs for all potential links from developable sites to nearby transmission assets to identify the least cost all-in LCOE.
Model Interoperability
The reV Exchange Model (reVX), another open-source package, provides post-processing modules to couple reV with capacity expansion models (e.g., the Regional Energy Deployment System Model and the Resource Planning Model ) and production cost models (e.g., Sienna and PLEXOS) used at NLR and by external collaborators. Model interoperability modules are custom designed to interface with the specific needs of each downstream model.
Recent Expansions
Along with reV and reVX, the reV team has also open-sourced the Resource Extraction Tool (rex), a set of modules aimed at facilitating access to the state-of-art resource datasets used by reV (the National Solar Radiation Database, the Wind Integration National Dataset Toolkit, and Geothermal Data Repository). The tool also provides a variety of computational and research tools (e.g., logging, parallel computation, HDF5 file formatting), that while developed for reV, are applicable more widely to users of NLR’s large resource datasets.
The reV team also recently launched Siting Lab, a platform to easily access all of the outputs from reV such as supply curves, composite siting exclusion rasters, multi-year temporal capacity factor profiles, local ordinance information collected by the COMPASS model, and more.
Amazon Web Services Accessibility
The reV model runs on NLR's high-performance computing system, and now users can access the full power of reV from their own systems through Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud computing platform. NLR has migrated several web applications to the AWS environment to expand access and scalability, allowing users to perform detailed analysis with massive datasets from their desktop.
Related Publications
Renewable Energy Technical Potential and Supply Curves for the Contiguous United States: 2024 Edition, NLR Technical Report (2025)
The Renewable Energy Potential (reV) Model: A Geospatial Platform for Technical Potential and Supply Curve Modeling, NLR Technical Report (2019)
Contact
For more information, contact the reV team.
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Last Updated March 4, 2026