Independent analysis results show Sunairio's high-resolution historical and forward-looking datasets can match or outperform industry-standard benchmarks, while addressing critical analytical gaps.
BALTIMORE, Nov. 12, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Sunairio, pioneer of next-generation grid forecasting software, today announced the publication of an independent technical evaluation conducted by EPRI, an independent, nonprofit energy R&D institute, in partnership with energy supplier Constellation. The study shows that Sunairio's historical and forward-looking weather and climate datasets can solve key functional gaps for grid planners while broadly matching or outperforming established industry benchmarks across key accuracy and physical realism metrics.
This study resulted from Sunairio's participation in EPRI's Incubatenergy Labs program, which provided the opportunity to conduct a demonstration project evaluating its weather and climate datasets for energy planning applications.
Sunairio's foundational weather data serves as the backbone intelligence for a comprehensive grid forecasting platform that specializes in replicating extreme event risk for energy traders, power producers, battery energy storage system (BESS) operators, hyperscalers, and demand response (DR) & virtual power plant (VPP) operators. These market participants rely heavily on time-series weather data to model the simultaneous variability between load, renewables, and outage events that drive risks to reliability and profitability.
To accurately capture correlated variability between load, wind, solar, and market prices, grid planners and energy traders require data satisfying five criteria:
- High spatial resolution
- High temporal resolution
- Long historical duration
- Physical consistency across coincident variables
- Forward-looking climate trends
However, traditional industry-standard weather datasets have routinely forced market participants to select multiple unrelated datasets for specific weather variables while compromising on temporal depth, spatial resolution, or the inclusion of forward-looking climate projections, depending on their application. For example, many grid planning studies in the US have traditionally relied on a seven-year-long wind speed dataset produced only for the years 2007 to 2013, providing a severely limited historical view of wind generation resource risk.
Sunairio bridges this analytical gap by unifying two proprietary datasets to provide a comprehensive, extensive, continuously updated, high-spatiotemporal resolution historical weather dataset — the historical Sunairio High-resolution Earth Data (SHED) — along with a calibrated, high-resolution, long-range weather forecast ensemble known as Sunairio ONE, which is trained on the SHED.
Together, these tools allow utilities, independent power producers, and traders to quantify a full spectrum of weather risk over long time horizons, instead of relying on static slices of history that can miss extremes and ignore climate trends. As recent weather-driven grid emergencies have demonstrated, anticipating the impact of extreme heat waves, winter storms, and severe droughts in wind or solar is critical for maintaining both reliability and profitability.
Key findings of EPRI evaluation
To quantify how effective the Sunairio data is, EPRI conducted an independent, multi-location evaluation of accuracy and physical realism directly against established public benchmarks. EPRI measured temperature, wind speed, and irradiance performance against public gold-standard datasets across more than 50 locations in the contiguous United States.
The study evaluated Sunairio's data against three widely used public alternatives: ECMWF's ERA5, NREL's WIND Toolkit (WTK), and NREL's NSRDB. The analysis examined performance across 37 major load centers, 12 tall tower sites, and 15 solar observation sites (SURFRAD/SOLRAD).
Across evaluated metrics — including root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), correlation, bias, and distributional alignment — Sunairio's datasets demonstrated performance comparable to or improved over public benchmarks:
Superior historical accuracy (Sunairio's SHED):
- Temperature: produced lower MAE than ERA5 across 24 of 37 load centers, with higher hourly temperature correlation across nearly all sites
- Hub-height wind: performed as well as or better than ERA5 and the WTK in eight out of nine analyzed metrics such as MAE, distribution realism, and correlation during operating conditions for wind turbines
- Solar irradiance: produced lower mean bias and a more realistic distribution of GHI than the leading public alternative, the NSRDB; additionally, the SHED dataset provides a continuously updated dataset (NSRDB is only updated annually)
Advanced forward physical realism (Sunairio ONE):
- Temperature volatility and hazards: matched or beat ERA5 on 92% of temperature physical realism metrics
- Climate trends: forward projections captured non-stationary climate warming and extreme heat event frequencies aligned with peer-reviewed science
- Wind and solar dynamics: outperformed ERA5 and WTK in representing diurnal and monthly cycles and short-term daily ramp rates, while achieving the lowest overall mean bias for GHI among all evaluated datasets; the evaluation noted areas for continued refinement, including synoptic-scale wind variance and low-wind tail event representations
The complete technical report, Evaluation of Sunairio High-Resolution Earth Data (SHED) and Sunairio ONE Climate Forecast Ensemble, is available to download free on the EPRI website.
For additional insights from the report, read Sunairio's blog post, "How the SHED and Sunairio ONE Solve the Power Sector's Biggest Analytical Blind Spot," here.
And finally, to learn more about Sunairio's climate-informed datasets, schedule a demonstration, or discuss integration into your organization's resource adequacy or commercial trading models, visit sunairio.com or contact the Sunairio team at [email protected].
About Sunairio
Sunairio is the pioneer of award-winning, next-generation grid forecasting software — the first forecasting platform to provide integrated energy, weather, climate, and market insights. Sunairio helps energy traders, grid operators, and asset managers make better commercial decisions in the face of increasing grid variability and extreme event risks. Sunairio and Sunairio ONE have received recognition from the National Science Foundation, American Clean Power, and EPRI.
Media Contact
Josh Petri, Inflection Point Agency for Sunairio, 1 (719) 357-8344, [email protected], https://sunairio.com/
Logan Varsano, [email protected]
SOURCE Sunairio
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