Santee Cooper partners with Google in shift toward AI-driven forecasting

Santee Cooper, South Carolina's public power and water utility, is teaming up with Google to bring artificial intelligence into its planning. The utility will use a Google tool called WeatherNext 2 to make more accurate weather forecasts up to 15 days out, which should sharpen its predictions of how much power people will need on a given day. It's also using Google's Gemini Enterprise platform to speed up financial planning, including work tied to Santee Cooper's $10 billion grid-expansion budget.

The utility's finance chief said better forecasting could save millions of dollars a year. A one-degree error in a weather forecast can shift power demand by about 100 megawatts an hour — enough to power tens of thousands of homes — and force the utility to buy emergency power at a cost of up to $100,000 an hour. More accurate forecasts are meant to reduce those costly surprises. Google said its AI approach, which relies on pattern-based prediction rather than the older physics-based weather models, holds up better for forecasts beyond the next day or two.

For homeowners in Santee Cooper's service area, this isn't a program you sign up for or a rebate to claim. It's a behind-the-scenes change in how the utility predicts demand and plans investment, with the goal of running more efficiently and avoiding expensive last-minute power purchases. Santee Cooper says decision-making and accountability will stay with human staff, not the AI tools themselves.