# GIS-Based Wind and Solar Power Assessment in Central Mexico
## 2 Materials and Methods  
In Mexico, the Federal Commission of Electricity divided the country in seven electrified regions [51], as seen in Figure 4. The area of central Mexico studied in this case includes some of these regions, and the states of Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Queretaro, Hidalgo, Tlaxcala, Estado de Mexico, Zacatecas, Mexico City (CDMX), Puebla, Morelos, and San Luis Potosi (see Figure 4).  
As shown in Figure 4, central Mexico includes Central, Occidental, and Oriental regions.  
In Figure 5, the location of 11 states in central Mexico, Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Queretaro, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi, Morelos, Hidalgo, Mexico City, Puebla, State of Mexico, and Tlaxcala, are presented.  
Table 3 shows the population of each state in Central Mexico, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) [52].  
The sum of the population of the states studied is 53,588,379 inhabitants, which represents 42.5% of the total population, which is 126,014,024 inhabitants.  
In the states shown in Figure 5, the National Water Commission [53] has installed 43 automatic weather stations (AWS), as shown in Figure 6. The data range from 1990 to 2021; the year 2022 was not considered, as only full years were analyzed.  
The AWSs are autonomous and automatic systems formed by a set of measurement sensors, electrical, electronic and mechanical devices mounted on a support structure where they are distributed, oriented and connected to the data acquisition, processing and storage system of the station, in order to measure and record the meteorological variables  
Figure 6: Automatic Weather Stations in Central Mexico.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**State** & **Population** \\ \hline Aguscalientes & 1,425,607 \\ Guanajuato & 6,166,934 \\ Queretaro & 2,368,467 \\ Zacacteacs & 1,622,138 \\ San Luis Potosi & 2,822,255 \\ Morelos & 1,971,520 \\ Hidalgo & 3,082,841 \\ Mexico City & 9,209,944 \\ Puebla & 6,583,278 \\ State of Mexico & 16,992,418 \\ Taxcala & 1,342,977 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 3: Population in Central Mexico per state.  
prevailing at the site and transmit the data obtained to the central office, where they will be used and stored in a database. The sensors in an AWS measure wind speed, wind direction, temperature, atmospheric pressure, relative humidity, solar radiation and precipitation. AWSs will be used to create solar irradiance maps for the central region of Mexico.  
To avoid the interpolation being cut off or not well defined, the data of 128 points from MERRA-2 will be used and placed around the entire shapefile of central Mexico. MERRA-2 is a reanalysis data set with hourly records from 1980 to 2022 of variables such as wind speed, wind direction, temperature, and atmospheric pressure. These data will be used to produce monthly and annual wind maps. MERRA-2 data were obtained from [[https://www.ul.com/services/windnavigator-wind-energy-site-prospecting-and-feasibility](https://www.ul.com/services/windnavigator-wind-energy-site-prospecting-and-feasibility)]([https://www.ul.com/services/windnavigator-wind-energy-site-prospecting-and-feasibility](https://www.ul.com/services/windnavigator-wind-energy-site-prospecting-and-feasibility)), where the data are downloaded after payment. These are.tab files, which are entered into the geographic information system and a coordinate system projected in Lambert Conformal Conic is used, then they are converted into a shapefile to perform the interpolations. For the AWS, the files used are in CSV and thus are entered into the GIS to convert them also into shapefiles.