Case Study: TransAlta achieves real-time telemetry insights and major cost savings with Microsoft Power Apps

Canadian power generator shines light on numbers

TransAlta, a multinational power generator, needed to centralize and analyze massive telemetry from thousands of field devices while avoiding a costly third‑party SCADA upgrade. Facing rising device counts, regulatory and billing demands, and an estimated $200,000 licensing/implementation hit from its incumbent vendor, TransAlta turned to Microsoft Power Apps and the broader Microsoft cloud stack (including Azure Event Hubs, Service Bus, Stream Analytics and Power BI) to deliver an incremental, low‑infrastructure approach for real‑time data collection and alerts.

Using Microsoft Power Apps together with Azure services, TransAlta moved from proof of concept to production in four months and processed more than 56 million telemetry readings within four weeks of go‑live. The Microsoft Power Apps‑backed solution avoided the $200,000 upgrade cost, reduced operational overhead and maintenance, increased uptime through managed platform services, enabled real‑time dashboards and anomaly detection, and provided scalable, resilient data ingestion and analytics for operations, compliance, and billing.

TransAlta

Nipa Chakravarti

Vice President of Information Technology