R$^2$Energy: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Robust Renewable Energy Forecasting under Diverse and Extreme Conditions

TL;DR

R$^2$Energy is a comprehensive benchmark dataset for evaluating renewable energy forecasting models under diverse and extreme weather conditions, emphasizing robustness and fairness in model comparison.

Contribution

The paper introduces R$^2$Energy, a large-scale, diverse dataset with a standardized evaluation framework for assessing the robustness of renewable energy forecasting models.

Findings

Robustness gap identified under extreme weather conditions.

Model reliability depends more on meteorological integration than complexity.

Benchmark facilitates fair comparison of forecasting architectures.

Abstract

The rapid expansion of renewable energy, particularly wind and solar power, has made reliable forecasting critical for power system operations. While recent deep learning models have achieved strong average accuracy, the increasing frequency and intensity of climate-driven extreme weather events pose severe threats to grid stability and operational security. Consequently, developing robust forecasting models that can withstand volatile conditions has become a paramount challenge. In this paper, we present R$^2$Energy, a large-scale benchmark for NWP-assisted renewable energy forecasting. It comprises over 10.7 million high-fidelity hourly records from 902 wind and solar stations across four provinces in China, providing the diverse meteorological conditions necessary to capture the wide-ranging variability of renewable generation. We further establish a standardized, leakage-free forecasting paradigm that grants all models identical access to future Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) signals, enabling fair and reproducible comparison across state-of-the-art representative forecasting architectures. Beyond aggregate accuracy, we incorporate regime-wise evaluation with expert-aligned extreme weather annotations, uncovering a critical ``robustness gap'' typically obscured by average metrics. This gap reveals a stark robustness-complexity trade-off: under extreme conditions, a model's reliability is driven by its meteorological integration strategy rather than its architectural complexity. R$^2$Energy provides a principled foundation for evaluating and developing forecasting models for safety-critical power system applications.