Assessment of seasonal forecasting skill for energy variables

This report describes assessments of the skill in seasonal forecasts of energy variables (electricity supply and demand) in European countries, using data from seasonal climate prediction systems available through the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). This work follows on from our previous report on the skill in seasonal forecasts of climate variables (ECEM Deliverable D2.2.1, Bett et al. 2018a), and uses the newly-available historical energy data produced in WP3 of the ECEM project (ECEM Deliverables D3.1.1 and D3.2.1, Dubus et al. 2017a,b). We show that, when examined on the seasonal-average, country-average scale, solar PV power and wind power are very strongly correlated to solar irradiance and wind speed respectively. This means that less post-processing of the climate data is required to obtain the corresponding energy variable, which can greatly simplify the production of seasonal energy forecasts. However, the cases of hydropower and electricity demand are intrinsically more complex. While in many cases they are strongly linked to precipitation and air temperature, it is clear that for some countries, forecasts could benefit from more bespoke, country-specific modelling.

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