Case Study: Axpo boosts hydro plant efficiency and scales analytics with Microsoft Power BI

Energy company boosts hydro plant efficiency, scales for business growth with Azure

Axpo, Switzerland’s largest producer of renewable energy, needed to centralize real‑time telemetry from its hydroelectric plants and move from time‑based to condition‑based maintenance to improve efficiency and sustainability. To achieve this it adopted Microsoft technologies—using Microsoft Power BI for visualization alongside Azure services (Azure SQL Database serverless, Azure IoT Edge, Azure IoT Hub, Azure Stream Analytics, and Azure Machine Learning)—to collect, analyze, and share plant data across the organization.

Using Microsoft Power BI dashboards atop an Azure IoT analytics pipeline, Axpo implemented a solution that ingests about 20 million measurements a day from roughly 60,000 signals, was rolled out to three plants in three months, and is being scaled across its 60 hydro plants. The deployment enabled faster incident detection, condition‑based maintenance, extended equipment life, reduced parts and waste, and pay‑as‑you‑go scaling with serverless Azure SQL Database—delivering measurable operational insight, lower maintenance costs, and more energy from the same water.

Axpo

Mathias Pawlowsky

Lead Data Science Hydro