The Virginia Department of Energy will now be able to access detailed data collected by NASA about weather conditions across the state from the past four decades.
The agency recently announced a no-cost partnership with NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton to integrate weather and climate data into energy planning and policy.
Ashish Sedai, associate director of energy modeling and innovation, said it will help state officials plan better in the short and long term.
“We wanted to have this partnership so that we can do our modeling, our planning, our forecasting work better, not just in normal conditions, but in all kinds of extreme and stress conditions,” he said.
Two years ago, the department began doing in-house energy modeling, one of the few state agencies in the country to do so.
Sedai said that includes forecasting the electric grid’s supply and demand, looking at factors such as data centers.
To meet power demand, officials want to know “what resources to build, when to build, and how much to build,” he said. “Weather is very important and a very instrumental factor.”
For example, heat waves and cold snaps drive up electricity consumption. On the supply side, the reliability of energy sources such as solar and wind is closely tied to weather conditions.
NASA’s data will allow Virginia’s modeling to get increasingly granular, Sedai said.
Paul Stackhouse, a senior research scientist at NASA Langley, said the team’s data stretches back to the early 1980s, growing more detailed over time.
“For every hour, you have an estimate of the sunlight, the temperatures, the humidities, the winds all the way across the state of Virginia,” Stackhouse said. “That provides a historical context to the variability of the weather conditions that we’ve seen over the last 40 years.”
Much of the data comes from NASA satellites that continually estimate cloud cover and sunlight at the Earth's surface.
That could be useful in determining the best places to build solar and wind facilities, or the most efficient ways to heat and cool buildings, Stackhouse said.
The figures also provide insight into long-term trends – for example, clear signs of a warming climate.
“We're seeing a little longer summers and a little shorter winters,” Stackhouse said. “But clearly, there's weather fluctuations from each extreme as well.”
Sedai said the state hopes to incorporate information about climate change.
“Once we get all the historical data, we can do some modeling and understand how the impact would be in the coming years to understand how the future will look like.”
Virginia’s modeling recently gained attention with the release of Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s first Energy Plan, which outlines pathways to meet growing power demand while meeting the state’s ambitious clean energy goals.
Sedai said the department’s forecasting will continue to be used in the 2028 version.
In the meantime, officials plan to use the information to inform potential legislation and work with electric utilities.
