More frequent extreme weather events, rapid load growth, and evolving generation mixes have made grid emergencies more common; Sunairio's new offering allows market participants to anticipate those episodes in advance with greater precision.
BALTIMORE, Oct. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Sunairio, pioneer of next-generation grid forecasting software, today announced the launch of first-of-a-kind Emergency Event Forecasts: hourly probabilities of power grid emergencies — starting with the PJM and ERCOT regional transmission organizations (RTOs) — to help traders, asset managers, flexibility providers, and investors understand how to manage an increasingly strained system.
As extreme weather, rapid load growth, and shifting generation mixes push power grids to their operational limits, grid emergencies are moving from rare anomalies to frequent market drivers. Sunairio's new forecasting capability equips market participants with probabilistic foresight to anticipate the tightest conditions hours, days, and even years in advance.
Navigating the "New Normal" of Grid Stress
When electricity generation reserves fall dangerously low relative to required levels set by NERC, grid operators declare an Energy Emergency Alert (EEA). These alerts can trigger sudden out-of-market interventions, manual load curtailments (brownouts or blackouts), and severe price spikes — with real-time energy prices often hitting or exceeding system offer caps.
While reserve-shortage-driven EEA events used to be rare — averaging just one per year across the US's Eastern Interconnection over the past decade — 2026 has marked a dramatic turning point. Already this year, Eastern RTOs have experienced five episodes requiring mandatory load management.
In PJM specifically, RTO-wide alerts were declared during record-setting summer heatwaves in July and again during autumn generator outage season in September and October. Each time, large industrial and data center customers were warned they could face direct disconnection from the grid.
Conventional market price and load forecasting models, which assume smoothly varying behavior, struggle to predict the sudden and extreme shifts that happen during grid emergencies. Sunairio's Emergency Event Forecasts bridge this critical gap by predicting the exact conditions that trigger emergency declarations before they occur.
"Just last week, PJM experienced another grid emergency that triggered demand response, which was a surprise to many. But our models predicted that specific timeframe as having the highest expected grid stress risk in the entire quarter several months ago," said Rob Cirincione, CEO of Sunairio.
Cirincione went on to share, "What we've witnessed across major power markets this year is a clear warning sign. As grid stress continues to intensify, providing clear, probabilistic visibility into these high-stakes hours gives power sector stakeholders the actionable foresight needed to ensure reliability, hedge financial exposure, and make smarter capital investments."
Powered by Sunairio's Grid Stress Index and Sunairio ONE
At the core of Sunairio's Emergency Event Forecasts is the company's proprietary Grid Stress Index (GSI), which measures dispatchable capacity utilization — how much of the online dispatchable generation fleet is required to meet system load. During critical hours, GSI moves in lockstep with operating reserves.
Sunairio's GSI forecasts are powered by the in-house Sunairio ONE ensemble, a next-generation forecast that specializes in replicating extreme events, generating 1,000 realistic hourly GSI forecast paths which are translated into precise, calibrated hourly probabilities (0–100%) for every level of the emergency ladder.
Tailored Solutions Across Energy Sector Stakeholders
Emergency Event Forecasts deliver critical operational and financial value across a wide range of industry players:
- Data center and large load operators: assess local and system-wide curtailment risks, optimize site selection, evaluate backup generation needs, and value onsite capacity under proposed grid rules (such as PJM's IRAS framework)
- Energy traders and independent power producers (IPPs): anticipate shortage pricing, size portfolio exposure to offer-cap price spikes, and position hedges ahead of extreme market events
- Demand response (DR) aggregators and virtual power plants (VPPs): predict dispatch calls days in advance to ensure customer readiness and maximize performance incentives during emergency windows
- Investors and asset managers: quantify long-term reliability risks and revenue potential across multi-year asset lifecycles extending out a decade into the future
Currently available for PJM and ERCOT, Sunairio's Emergency Event Forecasts will soon expand to cover all US grid regions.
For a deeper dive on Sunairio's newest tool and an analysis on recent grid emergency trends, read the technical blog post here.
To request a product demonstration or learn how Emergency Event Forecasts can be integrated into your workflow, contact the Sunairio team at [email protected] or visit www.sunairio.com.
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. For more information, please visit sunairio.com.
Media Contact
Logan Varsano, Inflection Point Agency for Sunairio, 1 (719) 357-8344, [email protected], https://sunairio.com/
SOURCE Sunairio
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