Leveraging Climate Services to Build Climate Resilient Power Systems

Climate change impacts the energy sector on multiple fronts. Short-term weather variability drives daily and seasonal fluctuations in supply and demand. At the same time, long-term trends and increased frequency of extremes pose risks to infrastructure performance, asset lifetimes, and system adequacy. Representing compound events (e.g., simultaneous low renewable generation and high demand) and spatial correlations across borders is a complex challenge, and uncertainties persist due to uncertainties from different climate models, emission scenarios, and downscaling methodologies.

1 Traditionally, energy planning has relied on meteorological reanalysis datasets such as ERA5, which offer historical consistency but become less representative as the climate diverges from past conditions. Some operators have begun to use climate projections, but often only a single scenario or model is considered, limiting robust uncertainty assessments. Moreover, many datasets were not public, restricted to national domains, or lacked multivariate coherence and transparency.

The Pan-European Climate Database (PECD4.2), developed in partnership between the

European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) and the

Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), marks a step change. It integrates both historic reanalysis and six climate models across four shared socio-economic pathways, providing harmonized, openly available datasets tailored for power system studies. PECD4.2 delivers key climate and derived energy variables, at sub-national to national scales and with hourly resolution. Its physical conversion models for wind and solar better reflect technological progression than machine learning methods trained on historical data, improving robustness under changing future conditions.

PECD4.2 places special emphasis on multi-variable consistency, bias adjustment for continuity between historical and projected periods, and quantification of uncertainties. This enables more probabilistic and risk-based approaches rather than relying solely on deterministic scenarios.

The openly available data and transparent methodologies foster consistency across studies and users.

Despite these advances, challenges remain. Current PECD energy conversion models, particularly for hydropower, require further refinement and country-specific calibration.

Progress is slow due to the limited availability and mixed quality of validation datasets. The sharing of detailed, harmonised energy data needs to improve.

Complex processing chains from raw climate data to actionable insights and the lack of standards for integrating climate information into energy planning lengthen lead times for energy-sector adoption. This leads to diverging approaches and variable consideration of climate risks. Closer, more generalised collaboration and communication between climate service providers and energy stakeholders are therefore necessary, as are the development of user-friendly tools for data manipulation and analysis and robust feedback loops.

Standardization and deeper data sharing are essential to advance prospective studies and build climate-resilient, low-carbon power systems capable of withstanding an evolving climate. The openly available PECD, based on state-of-the-art climate models and transparent methodologies, is an essential piece in bridging those gaps.