At present, our scientists are leading weather classification of extreme heat events for California utilities Southern-California Edison (SCE) and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) in identifying events that stressed the electricity grid in order to support operations and planning efforts to understand and identify future heat stress events to the grid. To support this effort, we have worked on a cloud-based, historical, near-real time and near-future platform, to enable California’s energy sector with access to high-quality, open climate and weather data. The project currently quantifies weather and climate risk to California’s aging natural gas system infrastructure. A significant portion of this work involves the management and quality assurance of historical observations data. We implemented stringent, customized Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) procedures to ensure both climatological mean and extreme event conditions relevant to the energy sector are accurately captured (such as temperature, precipitation, winds, and solar radiation). Our team worked hard to tailor QA/AC procedures positions, i.e. the quality controlled weather stations in the Historical Observations Data Platform throughout Santa Clara County, and QA/QC’ed a number of relevant variables per station for the Valley Water work.
This historical data platform will seamlessly integrate with the Cal-Adapt: Analytics Engine platform. This data will support current efforts in electricity demand planning, asset placement, resiliency, and estimating renewable energy generation capacity needs, and serve as a critical localized dataset for future downscaling efforts of global climate models in the variables and resolution (hourly, sub 3km) needed in energy sector applications. The historical observations data platform is supported by California Energy Commission grant PIR-19-006.