Case Study: BC Hydro reduces revenue loss and boosts theft detection with Dell EMC Energy Analytics Solution

Reducing revenue loss with advanced theft detection and energy analytics

BC Hydro, the electric utility serving 1.9 million customers across British Columbia, faced a growing electricity-theft problem that was costing an estimated CAD$100 million a year and rising 15–20% annually. To move beyond manual processes and isolated datasets, BC Hydro selected Dell EMC to help develop an automated, analytics-driven Energy Analytics Solution (EAS) built on Pivotal Greenplum Database and Pivotal Hadoop, supported by Dell EMC consulting and infrastructure (including Data Domain).

Dell EMC integrated smart-meter and enterprise data into a Hadoop data lake, developed meter and transformer analytics, and delivered visualization and operational workflows in EAS. The solution enabled faster, more accurate investigations—80% of actioned leads identified theft, unmetered consumption, or data errors—achieved payback in under 12 months, is expected to prevent about CAD$732 million in revenue loss over 20 years, and significantly reduced unqualified field visits, improved safety, and lowered the rate burden on customers.

BC Hydro

Elizabeth Fletcher

Smart Metering & Infrastructure Deputy Director