Santee Cooper Partners with Google Cloud to Help Improve Grid Reliability Through Better Planning

Three Key Facts:

• Santee Cooper is using Gemini Enterprise and WeatherNext 2 to modernize financial planning and load forecasting, benefiting customers by reducing risks and costs.
• Google's WeatherNext 2 model offers highly accurate medium-range weather forecasting, which could yield millions of dollars in annual potential savings related to Santee Cooper's daily decisions about serving predicted loads.
• Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise supports Santee Cooper's specialized AI model, which the utility expects to improve accuracy and reduce by up to 75% the time necessary to run financial scenarios.

MONCKS CORNER, S.C., Sept. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- 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.

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.

Partnering with Google Cloud, the utility is rolling out new predictive tools and conversational AI to help address this challenge, refining weather-dependent load forecasting accuracy to reduce market risk and simplifying complex financial planning scenarios.

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 the calculations for major projects, including Santee Cooper's $10 billion grid-expansion budget. Scenarios could be built out in hours or days.

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. At the same time, we are building a thoughtful governance structure that protects our organizational and customer data while ensuring we are getting the best results from these resources."

"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 – reducing market risk, giving employees instant actionable insights, and setting a modern standard for public utilities."

Santee Cooper's initiative to deploy these technology tools continues its commitment to providing reliable and affordable power and water for its customers. This commitment is demonstrated in multiple ways, including reducing costs by utilizing brownfield sites for new and expanded power generation and transmission resources. Santee Cooper also implemented the first electric rate in the state to ensure large load customers like data centers pay their share of costs, which ultimately contributes to a strengthened electric grid. Santee Cooper is leading the way forward to secure South Carolina's energy future.

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. Through its affordable, reliable, and environmentally responsible electricity and water services, and through innovative partnerships and initiatives that attract and retain industry and jobs, Santee Cooper powers South Carolina. To learn more, visit www.santeecooper.com and follow #PoweringSC on social media.

SOURCE Santee Cooper