Weather and climate services, and net zero energy transition

Richaihu Wu, World Meteorological Organization

In 2017, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) through the Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) initiated a new programme to support countries and partners with user-driven climate services for the energy sector (mostly the electricity component of the sector), especially for increasing resilience, accelerating renewable energy deployment, and adopting energy efficiency measures. Since then, the world race to achieve net zero carbon emissions by the middle of the 21st century has increased the pace.

For the energy sector, achieving net zero emissions requires a rapid decarbonisation of the energy system (generation, infrastructure, transport, etc) with much of the replacement capacity being variable renewable energy. As a result, the energy sector has recently begun an epochal infrastructure, technological and societal transformation. In this context, weather and climate services for energy are indispensable enablers for an effective and timely energy transformation.

With an ever-growing annual global energy demand – which saw an increase of about 30% in the past ten years – expanding energy systems are increasingly exposed to the vagaries of weather and climate. Electrical distribution and transmission systems, including for traditional energy sources, are also severely affected by extreme weather and climate events. Improved decision making that considers weather and climate information can considerably increase the resilience of energy systems.

From an energy sector user perspective there are several areas served by weather and climate services:

• characterisation of past weather or climate events using historical data; it provides a baseline, or first order approximation, of the current risks and opportunities, and thus it is key to manage the energy production and distribution at present;

• nowcasting or short-term weather forecasts for load balancing by maximising the usable component of the generated power;

• sub-seasonal to seasonal climate forecasting for maintenance of infrastructure, and resource and risk management purposes;

• decadal climate forecasting for multi-year resource risk management; these forecasts effectively extend the seasonal forecast range to typically ten years ahead, thus allowing us to have a longer risk assessment horizon;

• multi-decadal climate projections for infrastructure risk assessment, planning and design purposes; this includes providing authoritative data on possible evolution of climate considering different emission scenarios, including those aligned with policies. With high-resolution, high-quality climate and weather information, energy sectors can save money and reduce errors in the renewable energy generation process. For example, using reanalysis data, the error in wind forecasts has been reduced by 3%–4%. Sub-seasonal and seasonal forecasts are used to reduce the risks involved in operating renewable energy systems and increase the investments in renewable energy. Weather and climate data are used to develop decision support tools to provide information on wind, solar and hydropower generation capacity and energy demand expected over the coming weeks and months, thus helping clean-energy companies to make better decisions and provide better services to their customers.

There is a strong need to further develop collaborative approaches between weather, climate and energy, which are still too fragmented. More effective weather and climate services will not only contribute to creating attractive market conditions to scale-up renewable energy infrastructure, but they will also promote clean energy system efficiency and climate resilience. Increased, sustained investments in such services, supported by recognition of the need for such services through enhanced policies, are required to achieve this.

WMO will soon launch a new document titled Integrated Weather and Climate Services in Support of Net Zero Energy Transition, which is compiled under the aegis of the WMO Study Group for Integrated Energy Services (SG-ENE). The SG-ENE, established in 2020, has as its main purpose to support the WMO members and relevant stakeholders to create and sustain services delivery for the energy sector, as well as to develop partnerships for WMO to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goal 7, Affordable and Clean Energy, and the Paris Agreement.

2022 State of Climate Services: Energy (WMO, public.wmo.int/en/our-mandate/climate/state-of-climate-services-report)