Santee Cooper, South Carolina's state-owned electric and water utility, today announced a major digital transformation initiative focused on using AI to provide highly accurate and timely modeling to improve efficiencies and create cost savings for customers. Partnering with Google Cloud, the utility is rolling out new predictive tools and conversational AI to address grid stability challenges.
Like many electric utilities, Santee Cooper faces the complex challenge of balancing grid stability with rapid regional growth, unpredictable weather patterns, and fluctuating energy market prices. Managing vast public infrastructure today requires processing massive amounts of data across multiple isolated systems, making traditional planning methods slower and reactive.
To address load forecasting, Santee Cooper is deploying WeatherNext 2, Google's cutting-edge weather modeling technology, tailored to the utility's operating regions. Capable of generating hundreds of potential scenarios in under a minute, WeatherNext 2 delivers high-resolution probabilistic forecasts across lead times of up to 15 days – excelling in the critical medium-range planning window. By capturing complex atmospheric interactions and extreme weather risks days in advance, the model equips operators to anticipate demand shifts, manage renewables, and protect grid reliability with greater speed and confidence.
"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, Santee Cooper vice president and chief financial officer. "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. A more accurate AI-enabled forecast could save millions of dollars a year."
Santee Cooper is also deploying a specialized AI model to improve financial forecasting to better respond to changing operational demands and multi-billion-dollar grid expansion plans. Previously, a small financial forecasting team needed weeks or even months to work through complex spreadsheets and build a single financial scenario. Built on Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Santee Cooper's agent can enable rapid, scenario-based financial planning that directly feeds into calculations for major projects, including Santee Cooper's $10 billion grid-expansion budget.
To enable employees with their own agentic AI platform, Santee Cooper is deploying Gemini Enterprise across several other departments. This initiative helps employees use simple natural language commands to execute queries across complex systems, get answers in real time, and automate routine workflows – dramatically speeding up daily operational decisions.
"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."
"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 & Energy, Google Cloud. "Santee Cooper is demonstrating how Gemini Enterprise can augment existing infrastructure to solve real-world engineering and financial challenges."
For more than 90 years, Santee Cooper has been serving the people of South Carolina. The utility is South Carolina's largest power provider and the ultimate source of electricity for over 2 million people across the state
