Weather Powering Your Community: Communicating the Impacts of Daily Weather on Wind and Solar Electricity Generation

Clean energy production--primarily through solar, wind and geothermal--is scaling up rapidly in communities across America. This is being driven by rapid technological advancements, dramatic price declines, policy innovations, concerns about climate change--and by the fact that Americans across the political spectrum are wildly enthusiastic about clean energy. The coming of the clean energy era has implications for how we power our homes, vehicles, businesses, communities and more. Broadcast meteorologists can play an important role in this dramatic transition. In this 60-minute session, we will present a broad overview of the state of the clean energy transition occurring in America, show polling data on the extent of Americans’ interest in and support of clean energy production, present a new tool developed by Climate Central called Weather Power, that enables broadcast meteorologists to forecast short-term variations in wind and solar energy production in their market, and end with a case study of one broadcast meteorologist’s experiences using this new clean energy forecasting tool.