Ogre.AI Realizes Significant Costs Savings in the Energy Industry by Integrating Meteomatics API into Its Power Forecasts

Ogre.ai uses Meteomatics’ RESTful API to access one of the world's richest and most accurate weather databases. Meteomatics forecasts are now a key component of Ogre’s ML & AI process: used to generate precise power forecasts and solve key challenges of energy companies across multiple sectors.

Accurately predicting energy consumption and demand has been so important with energy price volatility

The difficulty accessing accurate weather forecasts covering Romania has created significant issues across the energy sector, which has only been exacerbated by the current volatility and increase in energy prices. As such, there is an increasing importance for the market to balance the energy grid. Producers, suppliers and transmission and distribution operators need to accurately estimate the energy produced, consumed or lost while providing the services, in order to ensure that the penalties incurred on the balancing market are minimal.

Accurate weather forecasts are crucial in accurately estimating the demand and production of energy. In fact, some of Ogre’s clients which own wind farms estimated that they previously lost more than €10m per annum as a result of these poor power and weather forecasts. One customer was even considering closing their wind farms due to high energy balancing prices. However, Ogre has been able to solve these challenges by integrating Meteomatics’ weather forecasts into its own proprietary ML and AI models.

How Ogre identified Meteomatics as the most accurate weather forecasting provider

Selecting accurate weather forecasts was really important to ensure Ogre.ai could successfully enter the competitive energy forecasting market. Hence, the company carried out a robust benchmarking activity that included forecasts from seven leading weather companies. The study identified Meteomatics as providing the most relevant service together with accurate forecasts across a number of locations within Eastern Europe.

Matei Stratan, CEO at Ogre.AI says that “Meteomatics’ API gives us access to all the weather data we need at high granularity (every 5 - 15 minutes). We need frequently updated data as market conditions changed and notifications within the electricity system are now carried out every 15 minutes. Plus, Meteomatics data connectors enabled us to integrate their weather data into our software very quickly.

“We are very pleased that we’ve chosen to integrate Meteomatics’ API as it has enriched the services we offer and helps us deliver greater financial savings for our clients: sometimes saving millions of Euros annually. Depending on the type of forecast being delivered, savings could be as high as 50%, with some TSOs & DSOs saving up to €100m per annum by using Ogre’s services.

Ogre.ai plans to bring exciting developments to the energy market in 2022

“Ogre plans to use the individual numerical weather prediction models available in Meteomatics’ API, which provides this useful addition to the Meteomatics Mix. As they do a lot of testing on different weather models for their AI engine, this multiple model features provides a very useful base for refining inputs and parameter aggregations”.

Ogre is looking forward to enriching its market by helping organizations to make more accurate predictions and to achieve overall greater efficiency, both in terms of costs and in operational excellence. Considering the ongoing energy price volatility, higher balancing costs and the accelerated and regulated transition from fossil fuels to renewables, forecasting will definitely be one of the most essential services required by the energy market participants.

Meteomatics’ API is one of the richest weather APIs available, giving users access to over 7 petabytes of data, with global coverage. All are available through a single RESTful API endpoint, offering greater ease of use and a consistent access mechanism. Combined with better forecast quality and an “outstanding level of customer service’’ as Matei enthuses, Ogre.AI is happy to endorse the quality of Meteomatics’ API and the support offered by the team.