Workshop Title: Maximising Reanalysis Data Value for Energy Sector Use
When: (Day 1) Tuesday 3rd June 2025 – 16:10-18:00 CEST
Where: Galzignano Terme Spa and Golf Resort, Sala degli Scrovegni

Session description:

This workshop will address the current status, issues and possible future pathways for making a high quality long-term global meteorological dataset suitable for a wide range of electric system planning available to the energy community.  It has been documented that the electric system is becoming more weather sensitive in new and complex ways and therefore system planning tasks need a long-term high resolution global dataset that accurately represents the broad spectrum of space-time relationships between a wide range of meteorological variables that are important to the operation of electric systems. A large number of datasets exist that are candidates (and in some cases are currently being used) for this application and new ones are being developed.  Most of these are “reanalysis” datasets that blend observational sensor data with physics-based atmospheric (also known as “numerical weather prediction”) models or datasets derived from reanalysis datasets by applying an additional layer of physic-based or machine learning models.

However, all reanalysis datasets have limitations that make them suitable for some types of planning activities but inappropriate for other types.   However, users have little guidance on how to assess the suitability of a particular dataset for their specific planning activity.  As a result, the selection of datasets for applications is dominated by legacy of institutional processes, dataset popularity and word-of-mouth recommendations.  This often results in poor dataset selections and possible negative impacts on the validity of planning conclusions.

This session will open with a keynote presentation that provides an overview from an electric system planning perspective of the attributes and issues of a currently (or soon-to-be) available datasets that are reasonable candidates for electric system planning applications and outlines potential future pathways to improve the suitability of existing or new datasets for this purpose and provide the users with knowledge and tools to select the most appropriate dataset for their application. The opening presentation will be followed by short use-cases presentations and a discussion among a set of panellists and the audience to identify the most significant issues with current datasets and the most promising future pathways to improve both the suitability of future datasets for energy system planning and the ability of users to select the most appropriate dataset for their application.

The presentation and the following discussion will be built upon the information in the 2023 report entitled, “Weather Dataset Needs for Planning and Analyzing Modern Power Systems” produced by the Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG) and the proceedings of the International Energy Agency (IEA) Topical Expert Meeting #111 on reanalysis datasets held in Denmark in April of 2024.

Session leads:
Justin Sharp (EPRI)