Despite advances in overall global electrification rates, access to electricity is still far from achieved. As of today, 1.1 billion people remain without access to electricity, which includes over 550 million people in Africa and 300 million people in India alone (International Energy Agency, 2012), while an additional 1 billion people lack access to reliable electricity networks (United Nations Foundation).

The Copernicus Data Policy pursues open and free access to Sentinel products for any user. In the current operations context, it is projected that the volume of Sentinel data available to users will increase at a rate of approximately 10PB per year once the Sentinels missions will have reached their full operational capacity.