Swissgrid Builds a Scalable and Cost-Efficient Weather Data Foundation for Grid Operations With Meteomatics

Before Meteomatics

• Weather-related projects relied on fragmented and isolated data solutions.

• Accessing and processing weather data was time-consuming and difficult to scale internally.

• Weather was often handled implicitly in operational processes instead of being directly modeled.

With Meteomatics

• Swissgrid can rapidly deploy weather-driven operational solutions with measurable business impact, helping to ensure grid reliability and reliable electricity supply.

• Teams across the organization can easily access and scale weather and climate data for new use cases.

• High-resolution PV forecasts support grid stability, operational planning, and reliable electricity supply as renewable generation grows.

Meteomatics fundamentally changed how Swissgrid accesses and uses weather data, replacing project-specific solutions (each requiring its own procurement process, custom integration, and lengthy implementation timeline) with a centralised, developer-friendly platform.

Using the Meteomatics API, URL builder, Python packages, and sample scripts, teams can quickly retrieve and process weather data without extensive support. Christoph Glanzer, Principal Specialist Research and Digitalisation at Swissgrid, explains: 

Anyone with a technical background can get up and running with the data fairly quickly. That has allowed us to scale weather-related use cases across many projects, even without dedicated full-stack developers.

This agility has delivered tangible business value. Christoph notes: 

A key advantage was the ability to deliver ad-hoc solutions for critical projects very quickly. For one project related to Dynamic Line Rating, this translated into significant cost savings.

Today, weather and climate data supports a growing number of operational and analytical workflows at Swissgrid, enabling teams to respond faster to new and highly specialised requirements.

One of the most significant examples of this in practice is Swissgrid's high-resolution PV forecasting system.

Switzerland's photovoltaic capacity is expanding rapidly, making grid management increasingly complex. Aggregated national forecasts were no longer sufficient, and Swissgrid needed more precise, regionally differentiated PV predictions to maintain stability across a more decentralised and volatile grid.

To address this, Swissgrid developed a high-resolution PV forecasting system combining Meteomatics weather forecasts with continuously updated master data from more than 325,000 Swiss solar installations (as of January 2026). The system generates hourly forecasts that are validated against real measurement data and made available to grid operations. Christoph notes: 

For solar forecasting, the Meteomatics API offered important capabilities, particularly the high spatial resolution of 90 metres, which is critical given Switzerland's complex topography.

The result is a significantly sharper view of solar feed-in across time and geography, allowing grid operators to improve load flow planning and deploy balancing energy more efficiently.

The collaboration between Swissgrid and Meteomatics has grown well beyond a single project into a partnership built around scalability and operational flexibility. A key advantage is the ability to address new operational questions quickly, without having to rebuild the underlying infrastructure each time.

Looking ahead, Swissgrid sees this as a foundation that will only deepen. "Going forward, I expect weather data to be integrated into even more operational systems and processes," says Christoph, a signal that for Swissgrid, weather intelligence has become a core part of how the grid is run.