Weather forecasting jobs

Resource & Generation Forecasting Jobs in Renewable Energy

Resource and generation forecasting turns weather predictions into expected output from wind farms, solar parks, and hydro plants, from the next 15 minutes to the next few weeks, so that traders, grid operators, and asset managers can plan around it. The job has become more demanding since Europe's day-ahead power market moved to 15-minute trading periods for delivery from 1 October 2025, which means forecasts now have to be right for 96 slots a day instead of 24.

Forecast errors and imbalance costs

A wind or solar producer sells its power before it is generated and pays for every megawatt-hour it gets wrong in the imbalance market. On a large portfolio, errors of a few per cent quickly add up to significant imbalance costs, which is why utilities and traders employ their own meteorologists rather than relying only on bought-in services. The hardest cases are the ones that move prices across a whole market: the timing of a weather front passing over the North Sea, fog that fails to clear over a solar-heavy region, or snow sitting on panels. That is also where a skilled forecaster adds most value over an automated model.

What the work involves

The job titles on Rejobs split into two groups. Trading and operational meteorologists, including junior trading meteorologist and senior forecaster roles, read numerical weather models every morning, judge which one to trust, and brief the energy trading desk. Weather-to-power data scientists and machine learning engineers build the models that convert wind speed, irradiance, and temperature into megawatts, correcting for turbine availability, curtailment, and wake losses. The work differs from wind resource assessment, which estimates a site's long-term yield before it is built; forecasting deals with tomorrow's output from assets already running.

Who is hiring

Vaisala, the Finnish weather instrument and data company, posts the most roles, many at its office in Boulder, Colorado, a long-standing hub for atmospheric science. In Europe, generators and traders hire their own teams: Ørsted from Gentofte near Copenhagen, Vattenfall, and Eneco from Rotterdam. Newer flexibility and battery companies such as Flower in Sweden also recruit forecasters and data scientists, because a battery's trading strategy depends on predicting when wind and solar will push prices up or down.

Machine learning in weather prediction

Weather prediction itself is shifting. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts took its AI-based forecasting system into operations on 25 February 2025, alongside its physics-based model. ECMWF reports gains of up to 20% on some measures and roughly 1,000 times less energy use per forecast, and names surface solar radiation and wind speed at turbine height among the quantities it serves to energy users. For candidates this favours a hybrid profile: a degree in meteorology or atmospheric physics combined with Python and machine learning skills, or a data science background with enough meteorology to know when a model is wrong. The number of dedicated forecasting roles is small, and candidates who combine both skill sets are scarce.