Lack of reliable data often prevents new private investments in renewable energy and government programs in this sphere. The paper offers a novel renewable energy resources system of potentials: energy, resource saving and environmental; better designed and more accurate methods for calculating the future exploitable technical potentials of wind and solar PV energy for a wide range of generating equipment in centralized and distributed power systems, taking into account existing social and environmental limitations. The paper also presents the latest assessments of these potentials for Russia and its 85 regions (in terms of fossil fuel saving and substitution, power and heat production and environmental effects), offering solutions to overcome methodological limitations of previous country-level assessments, such as incomplete or unreliable sources, absence of hourly, daily and monthly assessments, etc. Given the limitations of existing network of national meteorological stations and satellite monitoring systems it was decided to use NASA SSE database as a source of meteorological information. The methodology was validated through a comparative analysis of the data obtained in the course of this study and the data of wind monitoring campaign carried out by a German engineering company in one Russia's region for 18 months using 70 m masts. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.