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Weather & energy explainers

Long-form articles on how weather drives U.S. power markets. Written for analysts, traders, planners, and anyone who wants a deeper read on the data products surfaced across Weather Workbench.

Featured·Foundations9 min read— Updated April 15, 2026

How Weather Drives U.S. Power Markets

A practical overview of how temperature, wind, solar, and storm patterns translate into electricity demand, generation output, and wholesale prices across the nine major U.S. ISO regions.

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Data Concepts8 min

Understanding Heating and Cooling Degree Days

What HDD and CDD actually measure, why the natural gas and power industries standardized on a 65°F base, and how to interpret degree day departures in the context of weekly load forecasts.

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Data Concepts8 min

Reading the CPC 6–10 and 8–14 Day Outlooks for Energy Decisions

A walkthrough of the NOAA Climate Prediction Center's extended outlooks: how the probabilistic categories work, what they actually forecast, and how to use them in weekly load and gas trading workflows.

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Renewables9 min

How Wind and Solar Forecasts Shape ISO Operations

Why renewable forecasting matters more than installed capacity, how ISOs build and use wind and solar forecasts, and where the major sources of error originate.

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Severe Weather9 min

Hurricane Season and the U.S. Power Grid: A Field Guide

How hurricanes affect generation, transmission, and distribution; what utilities do before, during, and after landfall; and how to read the National Hurricane Center products that drive operational decisions.

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Data Concepts4 min

The CPC ENSO Presentation: Current State and What It Means

A short reader's guide to NOAA's monthly ENSO Evolution, Status and Predictions slide deck — when it drops, what the current edition says, and what the next several months may hold for U.S. weather and the power grid.

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Renewables9 min

Wind Ramps: How Fast the Atmosphere Can Take Gigawatts Off the Grid

What a wind ramp actually is, the meteorological setups that produce them, and why the shape of a wind forecast matters more to ISO operators than the daily total.

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Renewables10 min

Solar Forecasting When the Sky Is the Variable: Clouds, Smoke, Snow, and Dust

Why solar forecasting is fundamentally a cloud problem, how satellite-derived irradiance products work, and what wildfire smoke, fresh snow, and Saharan dust do to fleet-level output.

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Foundations10 min

Drought and the Power Grid: How Hydrology Becomes a Forecasting Variable

How the U.S. Drought Monitor, reservoir levels, snowpack, and stream temperatures translate into hydro output, thermal-plant cooling-water limits, and wildfire-driven transmission risk.

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ReliabilityNew4 min

FERC's 2026 Summer Reliability Assessment: What the Grid Is Facing This Season

FERC's May 2026 joint assessment finds record capacity additions but warns that extreme heat, western drought, and unpredictable data-center load growth remain the primary threats to summer grid reliability.

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Facts and figures come from public U.S. federal data (NOAA, NWS, NHC, CPC, NCEI, EIA, FERC, NERC, DOE/NREL) and ISO/utility public reports. Each article ends with a Sources section listing the publications referenced.