Using expired weather forecasts to supply 10 000y of data for accurate planning of a renewable European energy system (Papers Track)
Petr Dolezal (AI4ER CDT, University of Cambridge); Emily Shuckburgh (University of Cambridge)
Abstract
Expanding renewable energy generation and electrifying heating to address climate change will heighten the exposure of our power systems to the variability of weather. Planning and assessing these future systems typically lean on past weather data. We spotlight the pitfalls of this approach---chiefly its reliance on what we claim is a limited weather record---and propose a novel approach: to evaluate these systems on two orders of magnitude more weather scenarios. By repurposing past ensemble weather predictions, we not only drastically expand the known weather distribution---notably its extreme tails---for traditional power system modeling but also unveil its potential to enable data-intensive self-supervised, diffusion-based and optimization ML techniques. Building on our methodology, we introduce a **dataset** collected from ECMWF ENS forecasts, encompassing power-system relevant variables over Europe, and detail the intricate process behind its assembly.