Dive Brief:
- South Carolina’s public power and water utility Santee Cooper announced Thursday that it is working with Google to modernize its financial planning and load forecasting with artificial intelligence tools.
- Google’s WeatherNext 2 is designed to provide more accurate medium-range weather forecasts, which is expected to improve Santee Cooper’s load forecasting, the utility’s CFO, Tami Wilson, said during a Wednesday press teleconference. The utility is also using Google’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to speed up financial forecasting, she said.
- Wilson said the utility is undergoing a “major digital transformation” by “shifting away from legacy, clunky, cumbersome processes,” and wants to “automate the routine” without automating accountability or risk management, which she said will remain with human operators.
Dive Insight:
Wilson said the utility plans to use different approaches with generative AI versus agentic AI. Generative AI will be used to perform “low-cost initial drafting,” while Santee Cooper will use agentic AI to “execute multi-step processes autonomously.”
Santee Cooper did not immediately provide answers to follow-up questions about the cost of the new tools and exactly which processes will be automated.
At the teleconference, Raiford Smith, global director of power and energy industry at Google Cloud, said Gemini Enterprise was designed “specifically to serve as that intelligent operating layer for modern utilities, delivering at least three distinct capabilities that are built for complex infrastructure.”
WeatherNext 2 is a weather modeling technology that delivers probabilistic forecasts across lead times of up to 15 days, according to a Google press release.
Wilson said Santee Cooper has previously relied on traditional meteorological models to predict power load, but WeatherNext 2 could “dramatically improve” the utility’s forecasting ability, helping it “save millions of dollars a year.”
She noted that Google is helping the utility build a custom forecasting model that will “build in consideration for unique weather factors in our service footprint,” such as Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie — two man-made lakes large enough to create their own microclimate.
“A one-degree variance in the forecast can instantly swing our power to about 100 MW an hour, and that is about the equivalent of powering tens of thousands of homes,” Wilson said. “So if we’re caught short on a freezing day in the winter or a scorching afternoon, it could cost us up to $100,000 an hour to go out and procure emergency power.”
Smith said on the call that the difference between WeatherNext 2 and traditional meteorological models is that the former is inference-based while the latter is physics-based.
Physics-based forecasts do “a pretty good job looking out 24 to 48 hours,” he said, but after that, the math becomes so complicated that “the forecast accuracy just tails off significantly,” which can impede medium-range forecasts.
Santee Cooper is also using Google AI tools to “enable rapid, scenario-based financial planning that directly feeds into the calculations for major projects, including Santee Cooper’s $10 billion grid-expansion budget,” Google said in a release.
Additionally, the utility is deploying “several hundred Gemini Enterprise licenses” across the organization in an attempt to modernize its workflow, Wilson said.
Wilson said the utility is taking care in its rollout of AI tools to ensure that participating employees receive proper training for the handling of confidential and restricted data.