One Startups Quest for Better Wind Forecasts

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While Google has quietly been looking into ways to make weather forecasting data better, here’s a startup that just came out of the wood work that’s already doing it: Onsemble, a year-old company, has developed a business around collecting wind data all the way up at the height of the wind turbine. And this week the startup announced that it has collected wind data for the bulk of the wind farms in Texas.

How will high-up wind data morph into more accurate weather forecasting? Well, as Onsemble’s co-founder and Vice President Anish Parikh explained to me in an interview this week, the wind blows at a completely different rate 300 feet up in the air compared to the rate just above the ground. But it’s the high-up wind data that is crucial for the wind farm owner to make predictions.

So Onsemble collects the high-up wind data by putting sensors on cell phones towers, and using new tools like those from Second Wind, which has developed a remote sensing device that shoots audio waves up to 200 meters to measure the wind data. Onsemble takes all of this wind data — from wind speed to direction to temperature — collected every 10 minutes and sells it as a subscription package to companies that already sell weather forecasting services. “We don’t make wind forecasts,” says Parikh, “we make wind forecasts better.”

Better wind data enables weather forecasters to make forecasts that are 15 percent to 20 percent better. Weather forecasting services are already commonly used by utilities to manage their power grids. Fluctuations in temperature and humidity can determine how much electricity will be used by buildings for heating and cooling, and can help utilities avoid blackouts in extreme (hot and cold) weather. Companies like IBM are selling weather forecasting services to utilities; smart grid firms like Silver Spring Networks incorporate weather data into utility dashboards; and startups like EcoFactor fold weather data into their automated demand response services.

Onsemble is an infrastructure play, which ultimately could be a bit expensive. The company is funded and incubated by Houston’s Torch Energy Advisors. But the infrastructure can be established anywhere, beyond Texas.

Onsemble, and even Second Wind, could be the type of companies that Google is looking to work with. Recently a cleantech advisor to Google Ventures, Kenneth Davies, told me that Google might be interested in using its software and data expertise to work with weather forecasting hardware companies.

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