Powering a digital-first future at Alinta Energy

Transforming energy through data and digital innovation

In brief:

• Alinta energy is transforming into a digital-first business to improve customer and employee experiences, overcoming legacy systems and siloed data.
• EY implemented a Databricks Lakehouse, streamlining data workflows and enhancing data governance.
• The transformation projected up to $2M in annual savings, faster processing, reduced manual effort and stronger AI readiness.

Alinta Energy, a leading Australian electricity generator and retailer, is embarking on a significant transformation to become a digital-first, direct-to-consumer business.

With heavy investments in digital sales and marketing, Alinta is focused on enhancing its digital and data capabilities to support its strategic goals and proactively respond to external trends and changing customer behaviours. However, this journey was challenged by fragmented technology, legacy systems, siloed data and strained resources.

The business needed a strategic uplift in its digital and data capabilities to overcome:

• Fragmented user and employee experiences
• Inefficient content editing workflows
• Manual workloads and frequent resource exhaustion
• Rising risks of data breaches and poor governance
• Escalating platform costs and maintenance efforts

These challenges were felt across key departments including retail, merchant energy, corporate services, people & culture, and finance. This led to difficulties delivering projects on time, big impacts to stakeholders, customers who experienced poor service, and employees who faced inefficiencies and manual workloads. These challenges were compounded by issues relating to scalability, reliability and the growing complexity of legacy systems, all of which constrained the client’s ability to meet its strategic objectives.

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EY teams were engaged to help Alinta define and implement a digital and data strategy, centred on building adaptable and advanced data and digital capabilities to help enable a proactive response to energy trends and evolving customer behaviours. Central to this transformation was the design and implementation of a Databricks Lakehouse platform. This metadata-driven framework can ingest data from over 90 source systems, maintain transaction histories, and create curated, gold-standard datasets for business use.

EY teams also implemented secure, fine-grained access controls via Unity Catalog to automate testing and deployment, workflow management, and data usage monitoring, helping to ensure secure and governed access to sensitive data. Over 6,800 assets were migrated from Azure Synapse, the legacy platform, to the Databricks Lakehouse leveraging the EY GenAI-based asset, CodeShift.

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The implementation helped the client achieve projected benefits of up to $2 million in annual data platform cost savings and created significant improvements across the business, including:

• 70 – 80% reduction in effort to onboard new data and AI use cases
• 70 – 80% reduction in workflow failures and data platform maintenance efforts
• 30% reduction in cloud computing costs
• Eight times faster processing of critical workloads
• Better data quality, leading to improved data trust and better decision-making processes
• Enhanced data governance and reporting frameworks
• Reduced manual efforts and faster access to data
• Improved customer and employee experiences through faster insights and analytics
• Greater ability to innovate and respond to market trends and business needs

The digital and data strategy, and the Databricks Lakehouse have laid a solid foundation for Alinta to scale high-value analytics, AI and GenAI initiatives. With improved customer and employee experiences, Alinta is now better equipped to lead in a dynamic energy landscape.