Contributions of Climate Science to the Electric Power Industry: Forecasting with Lead Times of Hours to Decades

Variability of weather and climate represents a significant source of risk to the electric power industry. Weather influences power trading, fuel acquisition, load forecasting, systems planning, hazard planning and a range of related tasks within the industry. Lead-times for weather and climate information range from minutes for rapidly changing hazard conditions and wind-power resources to decades for infrastructure planning. Demands on forecast accuracy are equally daunting. A half degree Fahrenheit can mean the difference between normal operation and catastrophic loss of power distribution and transmission due to ice-laden power lines. Similarly, a 1% error in daily wind speed estimates for a 100MW wind generation facility can lead to losses approaching $12,000,000 over the plant lifetime. Current societal calls for changes in fuel sources will bring additional weather and climate related risks for the electric power industry, particularly for use of biofuels, wind, hydropower, and solar. I will provide an overview of the state of the art in mesoscale weather forecasting and regional climate modeling with applications to the electric power industry, including current efforts to reduce limits to predictability. For short-term prediction I will use wind speed forecasting as an example, and for the longer term I will discuss potential impacts of climate change.