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Better seasonal forecasts for the renewable energy industry

Nature Energy volume 5, pages 108–110 (2020)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 25 February 2020

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Anomalous seasons such as extremely cold winters or low-wind summers can seriously disrupt renewable energy productivity and reliability. Better seasonal forecasts providing more accurate information tailored to stakeholder needs can help the renewable energy industry prepare for such extremes.

The climate change mitigation benefits of clean energy come with great challenges. Compared to conventional fossil-fuel based energy sources, renewable sources, such as wind, solar and hydropower, are highly weather-dependent. Ambitious mitigation policies aiming to align with a 1.5 °C global warming target require a radical increase in supplies of clean energy. This implies that total power supply will be more vulnerable to climate-induced weather variability. Balancing the demand and supply of intermittent renewable energy sources thus imposes a big challenge. Consequently, renewable energy technologies must become more resilient to climate variability and high impact events.

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Fig. 1: Decision tree explaining user choices based on skill scores and probability distribution functions.
Fig. 2: Final and power futures settlement prices in Germany and France for week 3 in 2017, a severe cold spell period.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge funding from the EU Horizon 2020 project “Sub-seasonal to seasonal climate forecasting for energy (S2S4E)” (GA776787).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for International Climate Research Oslo (CICERO), Oslo, Norway

    Anton Orlov & Jana Sillmann

  2. Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain

    Ilaria Vigo

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  1. Anton Orlov
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  2. Jana Sillmann
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  3. Ilaria Vigo
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Correspondence to Jana Sillmann.

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Orlov, A., Sillmann, J. & Vigo, I. Better seasonal forecasts for the renewable energy industry. Nat Energy 5, 108–110 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-020-0561-5

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