Western Australia’s regional energy provider, Horizon Power, has moved its IT workloads to Macquarie’s cloud.

The power company signed a deal with Macquarie Telecom and Macquarie Cloud Services in order to move to a private cloud environment, and thus reduce its data center footprint, a process which has taken the company six months to complete.

Jeff Campbell, senior manager of technology at Horizon power said that the move is part of the company’s desire to provide a ‘cleaner’ service to its customers. The state government has a carbon emissions reduction target of 80 percent by 2030, and it is hoped that the use of a cloud provider will help Horizon reach this.

“To achieve the target, we are looking at how to build more digital and IoT-related services and remove the cost and complexity of managing servers, server clusters, storage devices, and backup processes,” Campbell said. “This will ultimately allow us to reduce our data center footprint and corresponding energy consumption.”

Macquarie was selected due to its ability to manage the operating technology and industrial controls system needed by Horizon, as well as the reassurance of data sovereignty that the cloud provider offers.

Horizon is looking to add a new set of advanced tools to its daily functioning, all of which will be supported by Macquarie.

“We’re introducing technologies that provide condition-based monitoring, such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) drones and IoT sensors. This allows us to capture and crunch data so we can make assets more efficient. For instance, we can send field staff only to the assets requiring maintenance or get detailed data to provide better services and products for customers in specific areas,” Campbell said.

Horizon Power previously ran out of on-premise data centers, information about which is not publicly available. In May 2022, the company opened an Internet of Things Living Lab which was rolled out across Lake Argule, Kununurra, and Wyndham which created a digital environment to help manage Western Australia’s grid.

The energy company generates, distributes, and retails electricity to more than 44,000 customers over 2.6 million square kilometers in Western Australia. In November 2022, Horizon Power partnered with Altavec, a cloud-based geospatial intelligence platform, to deliver the Geospatial Intelligence Program which provides insights into the grid across the state, including monitoring maintenance needs and planning expansions.

Macquarie Group operates data center campuses in Sydney and Canberra.