NextEra Energy says an artificial intelligence (AI)–driven dispatch and outage-scheduling tool has saved its customers more than $20 million so far this year. Santee Cooper expects a custom AI weather-forecasting model to help it avoid spot-market purchases that can cost $100,000 an hour during extreme weather. Both utilities say the tools moved from concept to production in a matter of weeks, not years.The two companies detailed their AI deployments during a Sept. 2 virtual media roundtable hosted by Google Cloud, alongside Raiford Smith, the company's global director of power and energy industry. The session focused on Gemini Enterprise, Google Cloud's platform for building and deploying AI agents, and framed both utilities as evidence that AI in the sector has moved beyond generic chatbots and into tools built for specific, high-stakes operational decisions."Utilities are being asked to deliver greater reliability, lower costs, and a grid ready for what comes next," said Rich Argentieri, president of NextEra ***** ytics. Tami Wilson, vice president and chief financial officer of Santee Cooper, described the shift in similar terms, saying her utility is moving away from "legacy, clunky, ***** bersome processes" toward AI-driven financial and load forecasting to save time and money.
Argentieri walked through NextEra's Grid Composer platform, which the company built on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and rolled out across Florida Power and Light's (FPL's) generating fleet. The platform pulls together real-time telemetry, load data, and generation profiles—what Argentieri estimated at roughly half a trillion data points a day—into a single model that compares manual dispatch decisions against an AI-optimized alternative.NextEra built the first version of the tool in less than 12 weeks, according to Argentieri. Since then, he said, the optimized dispatch and outage scheduling it enables have produced "over $20 million of savings to our customers" so far this year. NextEra has since made the underlying tools available to other utilities through a Google Cloud marketplace product it calls Optos, with Optos Composer—the version built for market and ***** et optimization—unifying generation, fuel, maintenance, trading, reserves, and storage decisions that Argentieri said have traditionally been managed by separate, siloed teams."All of those teams very much traditionally siloed. And not only the people, but all the data and the processes that go into that," Argentieri said, describing generation, transmission, and trading functions that rarely shared data before. Bringing those functions onto a single platform, he said, has let the company avoid "suboptimal decisions" and given teams visibility into how choices in one area affect costs elsewhere in the system.Argentieri also pointed to field applications. FPL technicians—he estimated 85% to 90% of the company's workforce—now use voice-activated tools to pull torque specifications or work-order gu
Argentieri walked through NextEra's Grid Composer platform, which the company built on the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and rolled out across Florida Power and Light's (FPL's) generating fleet. The platform pulls together real-time telemetry, load data, and generation profiles—what Argentieri estimated at roughly half a trillion data points a day—into a single model that compares manual dispatch decisions against an AI-optimized alternative.NextEra built the first version of the tool in less than 12 weeks, according to Argentieri. Since then, he said, the optimized dispatch and outage scheduling it enables have produced "over $20 million of savings to our customers" so far this year. NextEra has since made the underlying tools available to other utilities through a Google Cloud marketplace product it calls Optos, with Optos Composer—the version built for market and ***** et optimization—unifying generation, fuel, maintenance, trading, reserves, and storage decisions that Argentieri said have traditionally been managed by separate, siloed teams."All of those teams very much traditionally siloed. And not only the people, but all the data and the processes that go into that," Argentieri said, describing generation, transmission, and trading functions that rarely shared data before. Bringing those functions onto a single platform, he said, has let the company avoid "suboptimal decisions" and given teams visibility into how choices in one area affect costs elsewhere in the system.Argentieri also pointed to field applications. FPL technicians—he estimated 85% to 90% of the company's workforce—now use voice-activated tools to pull torque specifications or work-order gu
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