Solar: Masen Puts Twelve Future Sites Under Measurement for Fifty-Two Months

efore a plant is built, the sky that will feed it has to be measured. The Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy has issued an open call for tenders, referenced 14/Masen/2026, to recruit the expert who will run a solar resource measurement campaign across twelve future photovoltaic sites spread through the Kingdom; bids are due by Thursday, October 1 at four in the afternoon. The arrangement will rest on six solar meteorological stations, deployed in two successive phases of six sites each. Each site will first go through a period of installation, configuration and validation of the equipment, then twenty-four months of readings, which brings the projected duration of the whole to fifty-two months. The agency sets strict availability thresholds: more than 98% for raw data and more than 96% for filtered data across the campaign, failing which an extension of one month per year of measurement may apply.

What those stations will record comes down to an austere and decisive list: the four components of irradiance, global horizontal, global tilted, direct normal and diffuse horizontal, the albedo of the ground, then temperature, humidity, pressure, wind, its gusts and rainfall, logged by the minute or the quarter hour depending on the parameter. None of it is left to the contractor’s judgment: the sensors must be class A under the ISO standards, with recent ISO 17025 calibration certificates, and the campaign will follow the Guide to Instruments and Methods of Observation of the World Meteorological Organization as well as the Best Practices Handbook for the Collection and Use of Solar Resource Data. The readings will pass through a plausibility check, yield monthly reports and a certified annual report for each site, and travel back to an interface installed at Masen’s headquarters, which will archive them and share them through a programming interface. That is where the rest of it is decided: Morocco does not lack sun, it lacks the proof in figures, site by site, of what that sun is worth. These fifty-two months will say which of the twelve sites carry plants.

Photo: Richard Allaway, CC BY 2.0.