CASE STUDY Department of Energy
Building a unified data and AI foundation for critical national missions
3-MINUTE READ
When an April 2025 executive order arrived with a May 8 deadline to analyze energy reserve margins regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy (DOE) rose to the challenge. By using Quanta — a modern data and analytics platform built by Accenture Federal Services on the Databricks Platform and DOE's existing Databricks investment — the agency rapidly identified and accessed the necessary data, migrated it to the cloud within 72 hours, and completed the analysis on time.
Quanta has now unified 1.4 billion records across the Department, eliminated 640+ manual operations in a single office, and is positioning DOE to operate with unprecedented speed and efficiency across its 90 program offices and sites.
The bet that paid off
DOE faced a serious and familiar problem: fragmented legacy systems, exponential growth in data volumes, and no unified foundation to support advanced analytics or AI. Data silos across 90 program offices and sites led to duplicative IT investments and blocked real-time information sharing. Gathering data from departments that each held different datasets in different systems made it difficult for leadership to efficiently analyze information, let alone report progress to Congress or respond to emerging national demands.
Rather than replacing existing infrastructure, DOE and Accenture Federal built on the Databricks investment DOE had already made. Quanta is a data lakehouse: a modern architecture that combines the low-cost, flexible storage of a data lake with the governance, management, and performance capabilities of a data warehouse. It allows DOE to centrally manage and audit shared enterprise data, pull from existing legacy systems without large-scale replacements, and replace manual, spreadsheet-based processes with live data sharing across the enterprise.
This data foundation is essential to scaling impact for an agency whose work spans national energy infrastructure, grid resilience and critical security missions.
How the solution came together
The implementation was incremental by design. DOE started with cyber data to build momentum, working with CISOs across the Department to identify funding and demonstrate early value. Prior to Quanta, cyber data existed across separate systems with no unified view. CISOs needed a single place to aggregate that data and make decisions from it. Quanta provided that foundation, bringing cyber data together in one place for the first time and enabling security leadership to act on a complete picture rather than fragmented inputs. The modular approach was structured to avoid straining agency resources. Offices could connect existing systems to Quanta without requiring costly infrastructure overhauls.
Through a close partnership with the Databricks team and a rapid prototyping approach, Accenture Federal helped DOE quickly build an executive-level, consolidated analytics platform. That iterative development model — beginning with a focused use case and expanding outward — allowed the platform to demonstrate value early and gain traction before scaling to the broader enterprise.
What changes when the data works
Program offices now actively use Quanta for mission-critical work. The Office of Electricity, for example, uses the platform to support analyses related to grid reliability, resilience, and broader energy system analysis. Quanta's scenario features allow teams to forecast and predict implementation results, supporting better-informed decisions for the nation's infrastructure.
Across DOE program offices, Quanta has eliminated 640+ manual, repetitive operations, contributing to more than 2,200 hours saved annually. Where staff previously performed those tasks by hand, Databricks now automates that work, freeing the team to focus on analysis rather than data wrangling. Data that was previously siloed across 90 program offices, accessible only within the systems where it originated, is now available to any authorized user across the Department without disrupting the source systems those offices depend on.
1.4B
records unified across DOE
640+
manual, repetitive operations eliminated with Quanta
2,200+
hours saved annually
From data modernization to mission advantage
DOE is not finished. Over the next two years, the goal is for all 90 program offices and sites to have their data flowing through Quanta. The vision is an open, boundary-less data environment where critical inquiries can be answered without disrupting mission operations — and within the parameters of existing authorities to operate.
This data foundation is essential to scaling impact for an agency whose work spans national energy infrastructure, grid resilience, and critical security missions.