Production of energy from clean and renewable resources is an appealing subject nowadays. Solar energy has an important place among the renewable energy resources. METEONORM, TEKNOLOGIS and GEPA are models used to estimate the amount of global solar radiation recorded over the surface of Earth particularly over the region of Turkey. In this work, we compare and evaluate these models in terms of accuracy of estimation. As a result, the TEKNOLOGIS model is found to be superior to the other models in terms of preciseness in the estimation of the amount of horizontal global solar radiation reaching at a particular point over the region of Turkey. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.