Case Study: BC Hydro achieves cost savings and secure on-demand AWS compute with Rackspace Technology

BC Hydro controls costs and secures data on AWS

BC Hydro, the third-largest electric utility in Canada serving about 1.9 million customers and relying primarily on hydroelectric generation, needed a cost-effective way to run complex, on-demand power-generation models. On‑premises hardware and existing laptops were too slow or too expensive—running a key model took 10–20 hours on laptops, yet the new model needed to run about ten times per month—so BC Hydro sought a cloud-based processing solution to accelerate computation while controlling costs and securing data.

Partnering with Onica by Rackspace Technology, BC Hydro moved the workload to AWS in an automated, secure on‑demand environment. Using 216 CPUs that can be provisioned in 10–15 minutes, with data and code deployed in five minutes, models now run in 10–12 minutes and environments are torn down in 5–10 minutes, bringing the total cost per run to roughly $10 and enabling fast, affordable, and secure processing at scale.

BC Hydro

Lucas Malesku

IT Architect