The weather model is now a power market input
the weather model is now a power market input: google’s weathernext 3 forecasts wind and solar generation hourly at five-kilometre resolution for grid operators, and graphcast beat physics baselines that ecmwf spent decades tuning, in a fraction of the compute. belgium’s elia cut forecast error by 30 percent.
the next big energy trader is meteorology.
Context
Verified event date: Google DeepMind introduced WeatherNext 3 on Sep 3, 2026, with real-time satellite data, hourly refreshes and higher resolution; Google calls it the first global weather model that generates forecasts every hour. Its developer docs say it is for local data for people and enterprises.
Elia, Belgium's grid operator, has a machine learning project for forecasting system imbalance, and a Nov 2025 paper analyzes Belgian renewable energy forecasts.
WeatherNext 3's hourly forecasts match Google's post. Wind and solar generation at five-kilometre resolution, the Elia 30 percent error cut and GraphCast beating ECMWF's baselines are not seen in the sources read, so unsupported here, not refuted. Elia's project page read covers imbalance forecasting.
Related work
Watch next
- Look for Elia's own forecast error figure.
Sources
- Google DeepMind, Sep 3, 2026blog.google
- Google DeepMind, WeatherNextdeepmind.google
- Elia Group, balancing forecastsinnovation.eliagroup.eu
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 2 October 2026 at 05:23 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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