U.S. startup offers solar-oriented software for site-specific weather, variability scenarios
U.S.-based software company Sunairio has developed a modeling platform that purportedly offers more accurate tools for grid reliability planning and portfolio management support for owners and operators of utility-scale solar and wind farms.
Its high-resolution historical climate data and high-resolution future climate simulations enable insights into site-specific weather and reliability risks. The claim of higher resolution applies to spatial resolution, measured down to 50-meter resolution, extreme weather event frequency, and temporal resolution, offering hour-by-hour views, and views from 5 days to 15 years.
“Weather datasets typically span less than 20 years, which is inadequate to model risks of things like extreme weather events, or account for the effects of climate change,” Sunairio chief executive officer, Rob Cirincione, told pv magazine, adding that being able to quantify risks requires high-resolution climate data that extends “further into the past” than the data and models currently used across the power industry, and it needs “intelligence from global climate models” when projecting into the future.
Conventional models for solar, for example, often reduce variability to a yearly average. “It was not as important when renewable wind and solar were only 5% of all energy sources but that is changing,” he explained. Understanding such risks has a “real impact on revenue and grid reliability,” stressed Cirincione.
According to Sunairio, the software integrates with existing energy models and combines “generative artificial intelligence” and advanced statistics to predict weather patterns and climate trends. It is not, however, a short-term forecasting tool, nor used for next-day time horizons.
“Modeling grid risk requires a nuanced understanding of climate risk. Sunairio's commercially ready grid modeling solutions provide the practical tools necessary to account for weather variability and climate trends as the integration of renewable energy generation accelerates,” said Sunairio investor Alex Behar of Buoyant Ventures in a statement.
Typical customers interested in using Sunairio's probabilistic models are utility-scale developers, energy traders, and reliability organizations, such as utilities and independent system operators (ISO).
The company recently announced a new project with Xcel Energy, a Minnesota-based company with 40 utility-scale wind and solar farms across the state of Colorado. The project aims to improve accuracy and increase the granularity of weather data used in grid planning to be able to anticipate future energy variability and ensure grid reliability.
Sunaiario has worked with Constellation, a Maryland- based power company, to help analyze its growing offsite renewables portfolio, and has also completed work with Leeward Renewable Energy, based in Texas.
In the meantime, Constallation’s corporate venture arm became an investor in Sunairio’s recent $6.4 million venture capital round. The investors were all U.S.-based including Buoyant Ventures, Constellation Technology Ventures, MassMutual Ventures' Climate Tech Fund, and Rosecliff Ventures.
The investment brought the total raised by Sunairio to $8.8 million since its founding in 2020. The new capital will be used to expand U.S. market coverage in select power market regions and build its team.
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