Utilities NextEra, Santee Cooper shift legacy systems to Google AI
Utilities NextEra, Santee Cooper shift legacy systems to Google AI NEW YORK, Sept 3 (Reuters) - Major U.S. electric companies NextEra Energy NEE.N and Santee Cooper announced on Thursday that they are replacing legacy systems, including weather forecasting and certain operational planning, with Google-based GOOGL.O artificial intelligence.
U.S. electric utilities are being upended by the development of AI, as the proliferation of data centers drives up power demand while utilities try to deploy AI into their businesses at the same time.
Santee Cooper said it is shifting away from its current weather forecasting to Google-based AI tools, which it says are targeted enough to predict changes in microclimates caused by two large lakes in Santee Cooper's South Carolina territory.
Weather forecasting is a major part of utilities' near-term planning and development of long-term hedging strategies. If Santee Cooper is caught short during unpredicted weather swings, it can cost the company $100,000 an hour to buy power on the spot market, Santee Cooper CFO Tami Wilson said.
NextEra also said it launched a system developed with Google's Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to bring together data on power generation, fuel, energy storage and other details to help with on-the-ground work and planning for itself and customers.
(Reporting by Laila Kearney in New York; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
((laila.kearney@thomsonreuters.com))
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