Santee Cooper Rolls Out AI-Powered Load Forecasting and Financial Planning Tools
South Carolina's state-owned electric and water utility Santee Cooper has partnered with Google Cloud to modernize its load forecasting and financial planning tools. The partnership will see the deployment of Gemini Enterprise, an AI model that can cut the time needed to build financial scenarios by up to 75 percent.
The system works by generating hundreds of ensemble scenarios in under a minute and produces probabilistic forecasts up to 15 days out. This will help Santee Cooper reduce the risk of over- or under-buying power to meet demand, which can be costly. For example, one degree of temperature variance on the coldest winter day can cost up to $100,000 per hour on the spot market.
The utility plans to deploy WeatherNext 2, Google's weather modeling technology, which will improve accuracy in weather-dependent load forecasting. This will help Santee Cooper meet customer needs based on accurate weather forecasts and reduce costs associated with over- or under-buying power.