Tailored Weather and Climate Services for Energy Management: Lessons Learned from Introducing a New Energy Bulletin

Switzerland's current Energy Strategy 2050 pursues two key objectives: Abandoning nuclear power plants in the long term and supporting climate policy that implements measures to achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Change Agreement, which essentially means achieving zero net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. The strategy therefore includes the promotion of renewable energies in Switzerland as well as savings and market measures to increase the efficiency of the energy supply. The strong dependence of both the production and consumption of energy on weather means that there is a great need for customized weather and climate information. This need suddenly became urgent in the fall 2022, when the conflict in Ukraine jeopardized the supply of natural gas and, in addition, water reserves were significantly below average after a dry summer, which also jeopardized domestic energy production strongly depending on hydropower.  

In this situation, MeteoSwiss quickly developed a special weekly bulletin for the energy sector providing a detailed picture on past and future heating energy demand. It is based on tools from established climate and temperature forecasting services and tailored to the energy sector by providing monitoring and forecasts in the form of heating degree days (HDD). Expressing both monitoring and sub-seasonal to seasonal forecasts in terms of HDD and relative to climatology proved to be useful identifying energy shortages and taking early action. As there is inevitably considerable uncertainty associated with long-term forecasts, one of the challenges was to convey this uncertainty while still providing actionable information. 

We present the different product elements of the energy bulletin and then discuss our experience in this example of rapid service development in response to an urgent need, covering both technical and organizational aspects.