Tailoring Seasonal Climate Forecasts for the Utility Sector

The complex and interconnected nature of the energy industry across extraction, transportation, processing, production and decommissioning creates significant challenges to how this sector responds and adapts against climate variability, and change.

A number of projects – including EU H2020 such as SECLI-FIRM, S2S4E and CLARA – have used the latest climate science, and the related seasonal climate forecasts, to understand and, critically, anticipate the adverse impact of severe climate events for energy planning and operations. The link between climate and energy is very clear for renewable sources such as wind, solar and hydropower and for electrical transmission systems. While it is less obvious for more traditional energy sources they can nonetheless be severely impacted by extreme climatic events (e.g. heat waves for thermal power plant production). In addition, energy demand also varies strongly with meteorological conditions. Climate information, such as seasonal climate forecasts, is still seen as highly uncertain and with a low accuracy. While this may be true in an average sense, a lot of work is currently being undertaken, particularly by the EU H2020 The Added Value of Seasonal Climate Forecasting for Integrated Risk Assessment (SECLI-FIRM) project and C3S Energy operational service, in order to try to understand how value can be extracted from climate information so that confidence can be built for energy companies to operationally adopt the use of this information.

This meeting reviewed the science of seasonal forecasting, the availability and use of its products, and present how this information is used by the energy and water industries. A discussion forum was also be held at the end as a way to take stock of lessons learnt during the meeting, and to allow participants to quiz talk presenters.

This meeting can be regarded as an update of the 2006 RMetS meeting https://www.rmets.org/events/forecasting-uk-and-european-winters – how have things progressed over the last 13 years. There would be benefits to academia, operational forecasting and industry to host a joint meeting on advances in seasonal forecasting since the meeting in 2006 with a particular focus on the impacts and use on the energy sector.