Dive Brief:
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Climavision, a company offering weather forecasting data to utilities, power producers and government agencies, opened its network of 31 radars in 15 states to data centers beginning Sept. 10.
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The company has weather radars in areas that publicly available federal forecast monitors don’t cover accurately, CEO Chris Goode said in an interview. Filling those gaps allows for more precise weather predictions, he said.
- The expansion of subscription-based service to data centers underscores their increasingly active role in grid management. Such tools could help data centers avoid curtailment when grid conditions are tight due to weather conditions, for example, by activating on-site generation, storage, demand response or fuel-switching, Goode suggested.
Dive Insight:
Utilities rely on weather predictions to anticipate demand for heating and cooling, operational capacity of generation and transmission resources, and potential threats to infrastructure from severe weather and natural disasters.
Now, as larger and larger data centers seek to connect to the grid, they are being asked to act more like utilities by managing their own generation, storage and demand response. Accordingly, they may benefit from some of the same weather prediction tools, Goode said.
“What we’ve constructed is a set of solutions that can help to mitigate the sudden impacts of increased demand for energy, coupled with perhaps the chance that the wind doesn’t blow, or that that sun doesn’t shine, or it doesn’t rain in those areas,” said Goode. “Those solutions allow us to avoid very bad surprises: strains to the grid, which causes power outages.”
Goode, a former forecaster with the U.S. Air Force, said the government’s NEXRAD weather monitors are configured such that the beam recording atmospheric data can get to over 10,000 feet above ground level.
“That means you’re missing all of the weather that occurs from 10,000 feet to the ground, which is substantial,” Goode said. “There’s still a tremendous amount that’s happening at those levels, and if you know it is happening then you can inform those predictive models.”
The company’s service aims to fill that data gap. It also combines the data it collects with public datasets, commercial sources and a customer’s own sensors for “high-resolution forecasts for specific wind farms, substations or campuses rather than regional averages,” it says in its news release. Goode declined to share pricing information.
Accurate weather forecasts are particularly important for predicting output from resources like wind and solar. Research out of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that better forecasts for solar, for example, lead to a 30% reduction in spare capacity utilities held to account for forecast errors.
But it’s not only renewables that are impacted by weather. In 2021, Winter Storm Uri wreaked havoc in Texas by freezing natural gas infrastructure. Sudden swings in temperature can also cause fuel costs to spike, leaving unprepared customers in a bind.
Goode said his company has worked with CenterPoint Energy since Uri to help it maintain power for its customers during severe weather events such as Winter Storm Fern in January.
“Our ability to give them insights with greater time of the impending weather … allows them to harden their infrastructure and to prepare so that they don't suffer long duration outages,” he said.
Climavision’s 15-state radar footprint covers some states within the PJM Interconnection: Kentucky, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. Other states covered by Climavision radars include Louisiana, Georgia and Mississippi, where Meta, OpenAI and Amazon are investing billions for data centers.
