(Yicai) Sept. 14 -- China’s expanding electricity spot market is turning weather forecasting into critical infrastructure for renewable energy trading as more wind, solar, and energy storage capacity joins the grid, industry experts said.

Climate services can directly guide grid operations by reducing price uncertainty, protecting assets, and enabling the precise dispatch of clean electricity, Roberta Boscolo, climate and energy lead at the World Meteorological Organization, said during the 2026 Inclusion Conference on the Bund.

China rolled out electricity spot markets nationwide in 2025, with more provincial markets starting formal operations this year. The expansion is shifting renewable energy producers from “living at the mercy of the weather” to “trading based on the weather,” increasing the value of accurate forecasts for managing risks and returns.

But existing systems have yet to fully reflect the growing value of weather forecasting in power trading.

Boscolo said a system-level mechanism is needed to turn extreme-weather risks into quantifiable dispatch parameters through high-resolution forecasting. It should also assess the value of energy storage in supporting the grid and mitigating risks during extreme weather, enabling flexible assets to be appropriately priced.

Putting a Price on Weather Risk

The growing role of renewables is making meteorological services increasingly important to the power system.

The variability and intermittency of renewable power generation have turned meteorological services from an auxiliary safeguard into an essential requirement for the safe and stable operation of new power systems, Xu Xiaofeng, president of the China Meteorological Service Association, said at the Fifth Meteorological Economy Forum.

“The deep integration of meteorological data and energy and power business is creating a new 'blue ocean' of industry with considerable scale and rapid growth,” said Xu, who used to be the deputy chief of the China Meteorological Administration.

Guosen Securities predicted that China's market for power forecasting services will reach CNY1.7 billion (USD252 million) by 2030, representing a compound annual growth rate of 24 percent from 2026 to 2030.

The challenge is turning increasingly sophisticated forecasts into better trading and dispatch decisions.

Amid the inherent variability of weather and electricity loads, the key competitive edge lies in “making better scheduling decisions based on uncertainty,” said Shen Yanbo, chief scientist at the Solar and Wind Energy Center of the CMA.

By combining physical models with data-driven approaches, artificial intelligence can proactively translate potential weather risks into equipment load controls and automated bidding strategies, finding the optimal balance between safety and profitability in highly uncertain market conditions, Shen said.

From Forecasts to Trading

Energy storage companies are already putting that approach into practice by embedding high-precision weather forecasts into their dispatch and trading systems.

Envision Group's staff said at the conference that the company's Tianji weather model can produce global forecasts up to 45 days ahead at a resolution of five kilometers, with updates every 10 minutes. The model is among the top tier in Google’s WeatherBench 2, a benchmark for evaluating weather forecasting models, and leads in energy-related indicators including wind speed and precipitation.

“Using AI technology is transforming energy storage from passive remediation after fluctuations to proactive scheduling ahead of time,” Huang Zhiyong, senior vice president of Envision Energy, told Yicai. Weather changes affect wind and solar power output, which in turn influences spot electricity prices through shifts in power supply and demand.

Huang added that the AI system is in use at energy storage stations in Shandong, Inner Mongolia, Hebei, and Jiangsu, with more than half of those using it in western Inner Mongolia ranking among the region’s top 10 by revenue.

Editor: Emmi Laine