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.. – Getty Images. 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.”. As part of the tie-up, the utility is also deploying a specialized financial-forecasting AI model built on Gemini Enterprise, which it claims can cut the time needed to build financial scenarios by up to 75 percent.
Santee Cooper said that the deployment could reduce the time it takes for financial forecasting from weeks and months to days or hours. The utility said that the capabilities will feed into the planning for its $10 billion grid expansion budget.. The utility is also extending Gemini Enterprise to other departments, allowing staff to query internal systems.. “Our state’s rapid growth and transition toward innovative energy sources demand unprecedented agility in how we manage our system,” Wilson said. “Partnering with Google Cloud helps us turn massive data streams into actionable intelligence and protect our grid-expansion investments, mitigate financial risk, and ensure long-term financial stability for the South Carolinians we serve.
At the same time, we are building a thoughtful governance structure that protects our organizational and customer data.”. “Utilities are drowning in real-time data from weather feeds to asset data, and legacy systems weren’t built to process it at today’s speed,” said Raiford Smith, global director of power and energy at Google Cloud. “Santee Cooper is demonstrating how Gemini Enterprise can augment existing infrastructure to solve real-world engineering and financial challenges.”. Santee Cooper is South Carolina’s largest power provider, serving around 2 million people across the state.
Last year, the utility enacted a new special electricity rate on data centers and other large load customers across its coverage area. The rate applies to large load users that require 50MW or more of capacity and will run for four years on an experimental basis, before a decision is made on whether to implement the rate permanently..
More in North America. 13 Mar 2026. 09 Apr 2026.
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