The current energy demand increases every day and the deficit of electricity generation in Colombia due to technical aspects such as the lack of generation infrastructure, cost overruns in the construction projects of new plants and environmental variability as a consequence of climate change, entail a high risk of energy rationing; for this reason some of the users, whether industrial or residential, have decided to seek multiple alternatives to reduce the costs of their billing in interconnected areas and even supply their energy needs. Among these alternatives is found solar energy in its thermal and photovoltaic use, a resource that must be characterized in order to determine the technical and budgetary aspects involved in the implementation of profitable energy generation projects. This article seeks to provide technical tools for the design and implementation of generation projects based on solar energy, providing physical-mathematical approach based in the classical Angström-Prescott model that allow engineers and researchers to model the global solar radiation on the Earth’s surface in order to maximize the use of this resource in a specific geographical location. Although there are different ways to characterize the solar resource on the earth’s surface, this paper presents a review study focused on the most important global solar radiation estimation models present in the literature.