The past decade has seen an accelerated transition from carbon-based energy consumption to renewable energy use. This transition has fundamental implications for the German society. From the perspective of natural sciences, renewable energy resource assessment under changing climatic conditions and reliable forecasts for solar/wind power on a variety of temporal (hours to decades) and spatial scales (local to continental) are highly important for the energy industry. Renewable energy prediction on the scale of wind/solar farms relies on the capability of modeling and monitoring of turbulent flows, clouds, precipitation and the feedbacks in the atmosphere-and-surface coupled system (see work packages WP1, WP2, WP3 and WP5), and on the up-scaling of the results to a region (see work package WP4). Climate change poses further challenges, which may cause shifts in wind regimes and cloud patterns, and thus the large-scale distributions of renewable energy resources (see work package WP6).