Sunairio Wins NSF Grant for New Climate Simulation Technology

The solution will generate climate insights for energy at 1,000 times the resolution of traditional models to support greater power grid reliability and more profitable clean energy investments.

BALTIMORE, Md., March 12, 2024 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Sunairio, the first software platform to leverage hyperlocal climate simulation for energy prediction, today announced it has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I grant. The NSF SBIR program, which selects less than 14% of applying startups, funds high-impact technological research and development (R&D) across a wide range of disciplines.

For Sunairio, the award will fund research into a new, highly scalable climate simulation engine that promises to generate climate insights for the energy sector at 1,000 times the resolution of traditional, physics-based global climate models, such as the ones which support the body of research conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"The need for this research stems directly from the needs of the modern power grid, which is increasingly dependent on very localized, weather-driven assets like wind, solar, and distributed generation," said Rob Cirincione, CEO of Sunairio. "Given how variable wind and solar irradiance can be, there's no way to ensure a reliable grid or a profitable energy investment without understanding how weather variability at many locations will affect grid supply and demand balances. Sunairio is working to create more robust predictions that allow us to reduce risk on multiple fronts."

Currently, most grid operators and energy investors still use a very limited set of backward-looking weather data that ignores extreme events and climate change. These data gaps and shortcomings are partly to blame for the recent blackouts in California, Texas, and the Mid-Atlantic.

Sunairio's new climate simulation solution is a novel combination of generative AI and advanced statistics that early research shows can replicate forward-looking local (3-km x 3-km) hourly weather patterns and climate trends for up to 15 years. This approach will fill a technical and commercial gap because the traditional global climate models are very computationally intense and, therefore, only run at 100-km x 100-km, which isn't sufficient to accurately model site-specific weather risk at wind and solar farms.

"While Sunairio is already offering hyperlocal climate simulations for certain parts of the country to meet the needs of current users, our next step is to expand these high-resolution insights across all of North America and beyond, so that any and all future users can evaluate any potential project in any location with the click of a button," said Tim Ivancic, Ph.D., a Sunairio climate scientist. "The R&D that this grant will fund will make our solution orders of magnitude faster and more efficient, unlocking truly global scale."

"This research has the potential to advance our basic knowledge of AI and statistics ? not just for climate and energy applications, but for any problem where we need to see many possible outcomes of a highly complex phenomenon or statistical distribution," said Barry L. Nelson, Ph.D., advisor to Sunairio and Professor Emeritus of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences at Northwestern University.

The proposed technology won't replace the need for traditional climate models ? in fact, the Sunairio method leverages outputs from those models, in combination with other data sources, to create its more granular insights ? but it will create a much higher-resolution data set over a commercial time period that aligns with grid planning and investment horizons. Sunairio expects the R&D for the next iteration of its platform to be complete within the year.

To stay up-to-date on milestones related to this research and other initiatives at Sunairio, or to explore collaboration opportunities, please send an email to [email protected].

About Sunairio

Sunairio is the first company to leverage hyperlocal climate simulation for energy investment, portfolio strategy, and business insights. Its comprehensive analytics platform replicates climate, asset, and market variability to inform better decision making for all energy stakeholders, including investors, portfolio managers, renewable energy developers, and grid operators such as utilities, ISOs, and electric cooperatives. To learn more about Sunairio, visit www.sunairio.com.

Media Contact

Nikki Arnone, Inflection Point Agency for Sunairio, 1 9173271746, [email protected], https://sunairio.com/ 

SOURCE Sunairio