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How Stanford Built a Weather-Driven Curtailment Alert System on Top of Its Utility Data Historian
When Stanford's central energy facility came online, the capacity projections looked airtight. "We had like a 99.9% — this will cover all of our cooling needs," said Chris Guest, Manager of the Sustainability and Utilities Infrastructure Business Systems team at Stanford University. Then a heat wave hit, and the shortfall became a real problem.
A large research university campus isn't a simple load to manage. Stanford's central cooling plant serves research labs, healthcare facilities, and administrative buildings, all with different risk profiles. When cooling capacity gets tight, the question is twofold: how much load can be shed, and which buildings can tolerate it.
In response, Stanford built a live curtailment risk dashboard that puts forecast and capacity data in one place. The dashboard pulls weather forecast data to project the upcoming cooling load, then plots it against available central plant capacity. When the lines converge, building operators can see it coming with enough time to act. "[When capacity is tight] People can now go do actionable things about what to do with your building," Guest said.
Stanford built a parallel system for electrical load. Two PG&E transmission lines feed the campus, and outages have happened more than once. A live electrical dashboard tracks real-time campus demand against Stanford's 53 MW capacity limit, giving operators the same early warning on the electrical side that the curtailment dashboard provides on the cooling side.
Both curtailment tools rely on Stanford's [utility data historian](https://www.nexuslabs.online/content/stanford-utility-historian-migration-stakeholder-trust). "Having the utility data historian in place gives us that real-time insight," Guest said.
Guest frames this as a response-and-resilience use case, and it's one of the clearest arguments for investing in utility data infrastructure before a crisis makes the case for you. The curtailment dashboard didn't prevent the first heat wave from being a problem, but it means the next one won't catch anyone off guard.
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When Stanford's central energy facility came online, the capacity projections looked airtight. "We had like a 99.9% — this will cover all of our cooling needs," said Chris Guest, Manager of the Sustainability and Utilities Infrastructure Business Systems team at Stanford University. Then a heat wave hit, and the shortfall became a real problem.
A large research university campus isn't a simple load to manage. Stanford's central cooling plant serves research labs, healthcare facilities, and administrative buildings, all with different risk profiles. When cooling capacity gets tight, the question is twofold: how much load can be shed, and which buildings can tolerate it.
In response, Stanford built a live curtailment risk dashboard that puts forecast and capacity data in one place. The dashboard pulls weather forecast data to project the upcoming cooling load, then plots it against available central plant capacity. When the lines converge, building operators can see it coming with enough time to act. "[When capacity is tight] People can now go do actionable things about what to do with your building," Guest said.
Stanford built a parallel system for electrical load. Two PG&E transmission lines feed the campus, and outages have happened more than once. A live electrical dashboard tracks real-time campus demand against Stanford's 53 MW capacity limit, giving operators the same early warning on the electrical side that the curtailment dashboard provides on the cooling side.
Both curtailment tools rely on Stanford's [utility data historian](https://www.nexuslabs.online/content/stanford-utility-historian-migration-stakeholder-trust). "Having the utility data historian in place gives us that real-time insight," Guest said.
Guest frames this as a response-and-resilience use case, and it's one of the clearest arguments for investing in utility data infrastructure before a crisis makes the case for you. The curtailment dashboard didn't prevent the first heat wave from being a problem, but it means the next one won't catch anyone off guard.
Register for the next Nexus Labs event.
Sign up for the newsletter to get 5 stories like this per week:
This is a great piece!
I agree.