Revolutionizing energy operations: ACWA Power gains real-time insights with Azure AI Services

ACWA Power, based in Saudi Arabia, develops, invests in, and operates power generation and desalinated water plants. With the capacity to generate 65.6 gigawatts of electricity (enough to power nearly 50 million homes) and produce 8 million m³ of desalinated water daily, it manages 90 assets across 14 countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Jordan.

Four years ago, ACWA Power began facing challenges with its on-premises information technology (IT) infrastructure. Due to COVID-19 movement restrictions, its disaster recovery teams couldn’t react fast enough, affecting downtime. “With everything in lockdown, we had limited access to our physical data centers,” explains Bart Boesmans, Chief Technology Officer at ACWA Power. “This sometimes led to significant delays in our service operations.”

As the company expanded, predicting data volumes from the plants also became increasingly difficult, affecting analytics and maintenance operations. “Once we realized all the limitations of an on-premises IT infrastructure, we decided to migrate everything to Microsoft Azure," recalls Boesmans. “With this move, we aimed to address scalability, maintenance, and explore advanced technologies that our legacy systems could not facilitate.”

Scaling in minutes, not weeks

After migrating to Azure, maintaining the company’s data centers became easier. "Previously, we required multiple teams to maintain the data centers and manage hardware updates," Boesmans shares. “By eliminating the need for on-premises hardware and physical data centers, we have reduced our footprint. With cloud-based management, we have significantly lowered operational costs.” Simplifying the infrastructure also enabled ACWA Power to eliminate the redundancy associated with dealing with multiple partners for hardware and software.

By tapping into Azure’s vast, on-demand resources, ACWA Power saw enhanced scalability and flexibility—crucial benefits given the company’s large volumes of processed data. "Previously, we’d have had to wait six to eight weeks for hardware delivery and software configuration if we wanted to expand. With Azure, we can scale up and down instantly without delays that could impact our operations," Boesmans notes.

Seamless failover for faultless operation

ACWA Power’s original challenge—business continuity—was also resolved. ”Before, we had a single disaster recovery site in Dubai, so moving any service required sending a team there to do it manually,” Boesmans explains. “Now, we use Azure Site Recovery to host our virtual machines in multiple Microsoft regions, so setting up disaster recovery is significantly faster.”

The company relies on Azure’s built-in disaster recovery features to ensure resilience. For instance, virtual machines automatically switch to a different zone if one zone fails. Geo-redundant storage stores backups in multiple regions, ensuring data recovery even if a disaster affects one of them.

“Overall, the availability of Azure services has been excellent, with over 99.99% uptime,” Boesmans says. “Since migrating to the cloud, we’ve only experienced one significant downtime this year in contrast to the numerous challenges, such as power outages and internet failures, when we were running our own data centers. This has vastly improved our business continuity.”

Azure’s security features have also enhanced the company’s data protection and regulatory compliance, especially in countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, where local regulations require data residency.

30,000 pools of water saved a day

Once the move to the cloud was complete, ACWA Power could start addressing pain points in its business, starting with plant monitoring. Previously, the company relied on manual data collection and traditional monitoring systems. "This limited our access to real-time data coming from the plant, so we couldn’t see what was happening, let alone predict what will happen, leading to delays in identifying issues," Boesmans shares. For example, a team would manually sample the water at intervals to determine the dosage of chemicals needed.

The overuse of chemicals not only increased costs but also had a negative environmental impact. To reduce it, ACWA Power started using Azure AI Services and Azure IoT Hub to monitor sensor data across multiple plants. ”With Microsoft AI algorithms, we can monitor water quality and calculate the exact chemical dosage needed, in real time. This has significantly improved efficiency and minimized environmental impact,” Boesmans explains. The upgrade has also led to remarkable water savings—equivalent to 30,000 Olympic swimming pools, matching the daily water usage across Saudi Arabia. “This achievement is aligned with our government’s sustainability goal of optimizing water consumption across the country.”

Unified data via tailored views

Next, ACWA Power aimed to improve its data capture and reporting processes. Previously, the company's operational, maintenance, and project teams relied on disconnected systems, leading to fragmented data and delayed decision-making. "It used to be very challenging for our leadership to get a holistic view of operations because finding the right information was a task in itself," Boesmans recalls. Fragmented data made it challenging to track water production and energy output with precision.

To overcome this, ACWA Power gathered data from multiple sources—operations and maintenance, IoT devices, enterprise resource planning (ERP), work management, and other systems—and pooled them into Azure Data Lake. It then implemented Microsoft Fabric and developed over 100 reports tailored for specific teams and purposes. “Now, everyone has access to real-time data through Power BI dashboards, enabling timely decisions,” Boesmans explains. “Senior management can see how much electricity and water we produce in a day, which plants are down for maintenance, and which plants are operating.”

From reactive to predictive actions

With data lake pooling operational intelligence, ACWA Power built a tool that provides predictive maintenance insights. “Previously, we addressed problems only after failures occurred, which led to unplanned downtime and increased costs," Boesmans shares. Reacting to issues instead of preventing them also puts the company at risk of penalties due to government service-level agreements, as the company is committed to providing electricity and water 24/7.

Now, the control room and ground teams can detect potential issues ahead of time and perform planned shutdowns. " With insights from Power BI, we know exactly when a device may need replacement or repair, allowing us to fix problems proactively and extend the lifespan of our equipment," Boesmans explains. ”We can also identify the root causes of problems and even predict if similar issues might occur at other plants, thanks to historical data and AI algorithms.”

The company also uses smart cameras and IoT sensors to send automatic alerts for potential hazards and keep its teams safe. “With IoT sensors and Azure-based predictive maintenance tools, we now monitor equipment conditions in real time,” notes Boesmans. This also reduces the need for employees to enter dangerous areas. “For instance, if the system detects an issue—such as overheating or a chemical leak—our control room can alert the field engineers not to enter the area until the problem is resolved, keeping them safe,” Boesmans adds.

Plan for renewables

Building on these advancements, ACWA Power has identified more than 177 use cases to implement, including extending predictive maintenance to solar and wind plants. This will enable the company to predict production based on weather conditions and adjust operations accordingly to bring more impact from renewable energy. "We've just started our digital transformation journey and we’re very excited to continue revolutionizing our operations with Microsoft AI Services," Boesmans concludes.