A European Wide Meteorological Data Set Suitable for Electricity Modelling (Supply and Demand) for Actual Climate and Climate Change Projections

For the modelling of electricity production and demand, meteorological conditions are becoming more relevant due to the increasing contribution from renewable electricity production. But the requirements on meteorological data sets for electricity modelling are quite high. One challenge is the high temporal resolution, since a typical time step for modelling electricity production and demand is one hour. On the other side the European electricity market is highly connected, so that a pure country based modelling does not make sense and at least the whole European Union area has to be considered. Additionally, the spatial resolution of the data set must be able to represent the thermal conditions, which requires high spatial resolution at least in mountainous regions. All these requirements lead to huge data amounts for historic observations and even more for climate change projections for the whole 21st century. Thus, we have developed an aggregated European wide data set that has a temporal resolution of one hour, covers the whole EU area, has a reasonable size but is considering the high spatial variability.