How a startup helps energy traders navigate unpredictable weather and fast-growing renewables 

As the weather grows increasingly unpredictable and we rely more on renewable energy, one company uses AI and climate data to evaluate power demands for utility companies, energy traders and renewables investors. 

Sunairio takes high-resolution climate data, pulled from historical points and simulating possible future weather events, to predict weather and energy grid supply and demand at the hyperlocal level. It focuses on medium- and long-term forecasts, operating 15 days to 15 years into the future, said founder and CEO Rob Cirincione. 

He’s a former energy trader, which meant he facilitated the buying and selling of different energy assets while making sure there was a balance in the supply and demand of power. The lack of resources to track the variability of the grid — due to the introduction of renewables, severe weather and the soaring power demands from major players like data centers — inspired him to start Sunairio in 2020.   

“Weather has a really annoying habit of surprising you,” Cirincione told Technical.ly. “Just anecdotally you know this because we live it, right? And we’re like, ‘Oh, there’s another extreme, or here’s a record.’ Or, ‘It’s never been this hot, or never been this cold.’ So take that personal experience and translate that to a commercial experience where it literally has an economic impact for you in terms of your job.”

The idea landed Sunairio, pronounced “scenario” and based in Baltimore’s Harbor East neighborhood, a $6.4 million funding round that closed at the end of 2024. 

The round, which Cirincione declined to categorize within a specific round category, arrived amid a broader rise in wind and solar energy usage. The US Energy Information Administration predicted in 2024 that solar power generation will grow 75%, while wind will increase by 11%. In 2022, renewable sources including solar and wind accounted for 22% of generation.

What millions does for AI-powered climate tech 

Sunairio’s latest round brings its total amount of money raised to $8.8 million. 

The raise was led by Buoyant Ventures, alongside Constellation Technology Ventures and MassMutual Ventures' Climate Tech Fund, with additional participation from Rosecliff Ventures. Existing investors include Laconia Capital, Thin Line Capital, MVP Capital and Stage Venture Partners, per Cirincione. 

The participating investors stood out to him because of their climate and energy focus. Chicago’s Buoyant Ventures specializes in early-stage climate tech firms, for example.  

“We brought together a group of investors who have expertise in each of the disciplines that Sunairio is tackling,” he said.  

Sunairio also landed a $275,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for its tech in March. 

The startup specializes in two services: general weather intelligence, which is available across the country, and its grid variability offering, which is accessible in select areas. The latter offering is in much greater demand and sets the startup apart, he said. 

That particular service exists in a handful of power market regions, which describe areas where specific non-commercial organizations take responsibility for keeping the power grid balanced between supply and demand. Sunairio works with PJM in the mid-Atlantic (which incorporates Baltimore), NYISO in New York, MISO in the Midwest and ERCOT in Texas. It is now working to bring on SPP, a major energy market in the Southwest and mid-US, per Cirincione. 

Sunairio will use the funds from the latest raise to scale its platform to more of these power market regions and, eventually, provide services outside those major areas. 

These plans require hiring more people. Right now, Sunairio has a staff of five and plans to double that by the end of the first quarter of 2025, Cirincione said. 

What does an energy trader do? 

Cirincione started his career at Constellation, which is also headquartered in Harbor East. The major energy company’s venture arm invested in this latest round.  

He originally trained as an engineer but went on to spend 12 years of his career as an energy trader. When he left that field, he reflected that his job as a trader got increasingly more difficult over the years. 

Energy traders try to anticipate the balance of supply and customer demand in different regional energy markets at various points in the future, Cirincione said. 

Some traders evaluate the “long-term” weather, which starts after two weeks, and how it’ll affect the grid. The long-term qualifier is important, especially for huge power companies like Constellation whose size makes them high-risk. 

The rise in renewable energy made this more difficult, Cirincione said, because of its inconsistent reliability compared to fossil fuels or nuclear energy. 

“We're [traders] looking out in the future,” he said, “and we're trying to bring together a whole bunch of data to anticipate the expected future conditions on the grid and the range of risks around that.”

Traditionally, traders look at historical weather data and use physics-based models to predict the future. But since there’s only about 30 years of solid weather data and climate change continues to spur extreme events and unpredictable weather, those resources aren’t enough. 

Predicting how weather will impact grid volatility far into the future is difficult, but very necessary, said Yury Dvorkin, an energy expert and an associate professor in Johns Hopkins University’s departments of civil, system, electrical and computer engineering. 

The scholar also said it’s essential to recognize the pitfalls of historical data, which then complicates predicting future weather in the long term. 

“Nobody has gotten a crystal ball,” he said. “Think about the hurricanes. They have unique names, and they happen [every] few years. So we simply don't have enough data, and that's why we need to have some future models that will help us to anticipate a broader range of extreme events.”

How the platform is different 

Sunairio developed its tech to better capture the grid’s energy supply and demand by paying special attention to three aspects Cirincione said many other platforms do not.

One is location-based spatial resolution, which Sunairio addresses by generating data and insights from information captured right above a solar or wind farm. Another is time-based temporal resolution, for which the software logs data at an hourly resolution or less. 

The team also developed an extreme event resolution — a simulation model that runs through 1,000 possible events for every location. For context, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) model runs about eight, Cirincione said. 

Sunairio builds its software off public data sets from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and NOAA. Products like Google’s AI weather forecaster take from the same data sets, he said. But they don’t look at the three different aspects holistically, especially spatial resolution. Sunairio can capture a wind farm’s data going turbine by turbine, for instance. 

The startup’s main competitors are companies’ own internal solutions, like what Cirincione said he used as an energy trader at Constellation. Salient Predictions is slightly similar and uses ocean data to predict weather, per Justin Brodie-Kommit, an associate at angel investor network Resilient Earth Capital and cofounder of Baltimore Climate Tech Meetup. 

Climate solutions software firms like Jupiter Intelligence prioritize property damage, but that’s not Sunairio’s focus, Cirincione said. 

These issues Cirincione faced every day as an energy trader due to the sector’s shortfalls ultimately pushed him to start Sunairio. 

“This was sort of an existential challenge of the energy transition: How do you manage variability?” he said. “That's when I took the leap and started the business.”