Adverse weather scenarios for renewable energy system testing

The Met Office was commissioned to inform the Commission’s work on low carbon energy generation and support recommendations made in the National Infrastructure Assessment through the development of a data set of adverse weather scenarios, based on physically plausible weather conditions, representing a range of possible extreme events, and the effect of future climate change on the UK’s energy system.

This report summarises the findings of the discovery phase of that project. It has been completed by the Met Office in partnership with the Commission and the Committee on Climate Change (CCC). The aim of the discovery phase has been to investigate the feasibility of producing a widely usable extreme weather data set for energy system modelling.

This discovery phase follows on from an earlier literature review by the Met Office, published in 2019, which summarised earlier research undertaken on the impact of climate variability on energy networks that are highly dependent on renewable generation, that focused on extreme stress events in relation to a high renewables scenario and the impact on security of supply.

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