South Carolina’s state-owned electric and water utility Santee Cooper has partnered with Google Cloud to roll out its Gemini Enterprise and WeatherNext 2 AI tools to modernize load forecasting and financial planning across its footprint.
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The utility said that it will deploy WeatherNext 2, Google's weather modeling technology, to improve accuracy in weather-dependent load forecasting. The system works by generating hundreds of ensemble scenarios in under a minute and produces probabilistic forecasts up to 15 days out. Santee Cooper claims that more accurate forecasting will play a key role in reducing the risk of over- or under-buying power to meet demand.
"We plan to meet customer needs in part based on weather forecasts. The more accurate the weather forecast, the more accurately we can plan for meeting customer demand each hour of each day," said Tami Wilson, vice president and CFO at Santee Cooper. "If we overestimate how much electricity we will need, we spend money on fuel and operations we don't need. If we underestimate our power needs, we are forced to buy electricity on the spot market, often at high prices. On the coldest winter day, one degree of temperature variance can cost up to $100,000 per hour on the spot market."
