Climate Analytics to Support Natural Gas Sector Utilities: Actionable, Responsive and Open Solutions for Historical Climate Needs in California
This platform will provide quality-controlled weather-related data of interest to natural gas stakeholders.
Eagle Rock Analytics, Inc.
Recipient
Sacramento, CA
Recipient Location
8th
Senate District
10th
Assembly District
$770,752
Amount Spent
Active
Project Status
Project Update
To date, observational hourly weather data records for over 15,000 stations covering 43 years (1980 to 2022) have been cleaned, standardized, and placed in cloud-based storage. Finalization of automated quality assurance and control (QA/QC) processes is underway. This work builds on the project’s earlier discussions with gas and other energy industry stakeholders regarding specific weather-data needs and concerns, as well as on development of quality assurance and control best practices and metadata standards for hourly weather data.
The Issue
Gas IOUs have expressed a need for continuously updated, quality-controlled, fine resolution climate data. Risks from concurrent or sequential climate events (i.e., landslides in areas impacted by wildfire followed by extreme precipitation) are poorly understood and represent a major risk to gas system infrastructure. Historical climate data and climate-related geohazards are not sufficiently resolved to elucidate critical dynamics between the fossil gas system and climate. Improvements in historical climate data as well as its availability are necessary to allow for climate resilience and adaption planning to inform planning for the gas system.
Project Innovation
The Recipient is producing a data assimilation platform that serves as a central location for weather-related data of interest to gas stakeholders. The platform will provide continuously updated weather observations, remote sensing, and reanalysis data that support gas sector adaptation and resiliency. This data assimilation platform will be extended to generate value-added data products, such as risk from landslides triggered by extreme precipitation in areas severely impacted by wildfire. These value-added products will provide insights into climate-fossil gas system dynamics. The data assimilation platform will enable data produced by other CEC-funded research to be made available quickly, with lower costs to ratepayers. The project will use machine learning and advanced statistical techniques using open source software to bring big-data, intelligent computing techniques to climate resilience planning problems in the fossil gas system. The final data product will be publicly available through Cal-Adapt.
Project Goals
Project Benefits
The project will build a data assimilation platform that will provide high-resolution historical climate data of relevance to gas system adaptation. The platform will be designed to enable technological advances beyond the project period, as transfer of the platform to CEC will facilitate use after the project is complete. Sustained outreach throughout the project will help overcome barriers associated with a lack of representation in achieving statutory energy goals and in informing future policies. This applied research project will produce data outputs designed to inform engineering decisions and lead to actionable climate resilience outcomes. Informed deployment of infrastructure will increase energy reliability through reductions of damage and decrease societal costs through provision of a centralized, quality-controlled data resource.
This project supports research efforts under California's Fifth Climate Change Assessment.
Affordability
The design and implementation of this work will ensure that historical climate data of relevance to gas sector planning can be continuously updated and maintained at a low cost to ratepayers.
Reliability
High-quality energy-relevant historical weather data informs innovative high-granularity analyses of infrastructure analysis, energy supply, and energy demand.
Key Project Members
Owen Doherty
Subrecipients
Smitha Buddhavarapu
