The development of a Hybrid Renewable Energy Forecasting System under the Destination Earth initiative.

The transition towards clean energy consists a fundamental challenge in most recent EU policies as well as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Paris Agreement on climate change. However, the dependency of renewable energy systems from climate and weather, renders it into a quite challenging task. Besides a number of factors that need to be initially taken into account and relate to the efficiency of the systems and their resilience to climate-related factors, the day-to-day energy market requires accurate and detailed information on solar and wind availability in different spatial scales, as energy users range from roof top private owners to regional and large-scale facilities. This kind of information can only be provided through a fusion of numerical models and satellite based earth observation platforms.

In order to accommodate this need and act as a decision support system, a Hybrid Renewable Energy Forecasting System (HYREF) is developed for solar and wind forecasting, under the framework of Destination Renewable Energy (DRE), a European Space Agency (ESA) funded project. The HYREF utilises outputs from high resolution forecasting models, Destination Earth (DestinE) Digital Twin forecast data and Data Lake data (e.g. Global Ocean 1/12° Physics Analysis and Forecast, Vegetation Indices, CORINE Land Cover, and Global 10-daily Fraction of Vegetation Cover, data from the Weather-induced extremes Digital Twin among others) as well as end-user provided historical and real-time data that allow for specific site adaptation through probabilistic models and statistical post processing. The service will use the newly established Service Platform (DESP) that is supported by the DestinE initiative. The HYREF software is flexible, will provide spatial upscaling options based on the DESP data coverage and, as a user-driven service, will evolve gradually through continuous interaction and feedback from the end-users with additional direct engagement of market stakeholders. The final product is expected to increase energy efficiency and cater the needs of a broad spectrum of renewable energy users from private owners to large-scale facilities, industrial users, up to transmission and distribution national operators.