Cloud Levels the Playing Field in the Energy Industry

We operate as a lean technology startup in the traditionally conservative energy industry. We have to. Going up against $100 billion behemoths requires agility and operational efficiency so we can make smart, quick decisions in the moment and move at the speed of the market. Technology -- specifically digital transformation in the cloud -- has enabled this bold business model, allowing us to bridge the budget gap and compete against much larger competitors that have been in business for decades.  

But simply declaring you’re going to operate in the cloud isn’t likely to lead to success. What we set out to do hadn’t been done before, but we were lucky enough to be working with two industry leaders that helped us make the right technology decisions during a relatively fast implementation cycle -- the impact of which proved valuable to operations, employee productivity, and morale, especially in a market as competitive as the energy sector.  

Pioneering Cloud Solution   

Our core mission is to build power plants for companies that want to co-locate power generation near where they need it -- for data centers, new industry, and other places that have rapidly growing electricity needs. The ability to remotely operate modern control room systems is mission critical, allowing us to meet resilience, compliance and security requirements of our customers without having to deploy people on-site at every customer plant. Data fuels our remote management capabilities, providing operators fingertip access to all kinds of information about our customers’ on-site grids, including generation, usage and asset health data, which is fed to a central control center near Houston, Texas.  

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Building a vast wide-area network with high-performance fiber would cost tens of millions of dollars. Some of our well-funded competitors have done this, building massive IT infrastructures across customer sites at a scale that rivals the world’s biggest tech companies. We took a different path, working with Hitachi Energy and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a cloud-based network management solution. Moving to the cloud led to a six-month deployment timeline and cost a third of the budget required to build a similar on-premises deployment.  

Our cloud strategy allows our operators to monitor and control grid assets distributed across the state from a central location and provides fast response, redundancy, disaster recovery, and security services -- all the capabilities you’d expect from one of the major players in our field. By working closely with our partners, we can do this without the big budget of our competitors nor hiring or training additional personnel  

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Keeping Families Together During a Disaster  

Moving to the cloud provided immediate value. Only months after migrating to the cloud, Hurricane Beryl struck the Texas coastline and disrupted power throughout the state. Our customers needed their power plants up and running at optimal capacity to mitigate the outages.   

Normally, we would have had to send our operators hundreds of miles on site to oversee plant recoveries -- a costly and time-consuming prospect. However, our cloud-native strategy allowed our operators to simply log on from home where they could maintain operators from a web-based dashboard. Not only did we keep our customers up and running, but we also didn’t have to disrupt our workers’ families during the federally declared disaster.  

The Cloud Delivers Operational Flexibility  

Operating in the energy industry as a lean startup is much easier when you leverage the power of cloud technology to create operational efficiencies, provide stellar experiences to customers and make fast, data-informed decisions that put us one step ahead of larger competitors. Through the cloud, we are able to grow our IT capabilities in line with business growth objectives. While we currently operate plants that generate less than 100 megawatts (MW) of power, we’ll be able to scale our SCADA and network management operations to meet the needs of any sized plant in the future. We’ll be able to meet this demand without having to over-provision resources in advance or invest millions of dollars in an on-premises data center. And that flexibility is worth its weight in gold.  

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