Data, Energy, and Analytics
Context: ReNew Power is a rapidly growing renewables company in India that has raised record
amounts of capital and has scaled its portfolio to become India’s largest renewables power
company in a relatively short amount of time. ReNew alone generates more than 1% of all of
India’s electricity needs each year – all from renewables. Given how quickly it has scaled, it now
generates troves of data on a second-by-second basis. However, the company has still not
formalized a data strategy to use this data to create value. Management would like to understand
what are the possible ways in which this rich data can be used to create value, and then create a
strategy roadmap to develop its data analytics capabilities.
Part 1:
Please answer the following questions within the specified word limits
1. Please give a broad overview on how data analytics and big data work, and the applications
and use-cases across different industries (200 words)
2. Have there been any clear-cut success stories on using operational data, from any field
(e.g. healthcare, aviation, agriculture, manufacturing, etc.), that has resulted in either the
spawning of new businesses or in significant cost savings? (200 words)
3. What are similar, power generation companies doing with their own data around the
world? What are their data analytics strategies? What are best practices followed around
data among global power generators? (300 words)
4. What is the right strategy to build on a data science capability? Should management start
an accelerator program or an incubator and open up its data to startups? Or should
management build a separate “top-down” big data unit within the organization to manage
and harness this data? Explain the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches with
examples of successes and failures from other industries and/or geographies (500 words)
5. What are the kinds of skills the company would need to develop an internal big data
practice? (150 words)
Part 2:
Using the information that you would have gathered in Part 1, please recommend at least 1 area in
which we can harness and build on digital/data analytics/big data capabilities.
Please use the following framework to suggest your interventions. You may also share an excel
backup, if required:
Framework Head Description
Potential business unit Please state what business unit within the company your
intervention/idea would be relevant to (E.g., corporate finance, wind,
solar, HR, etc.)
Problem statement Please state what potential business problem your proposed digital
intervention can solve (e.g., better use of machine-level data to create
a predictive maintenance tool; or the use of data science techniques
to identify employees likely to leave the organization). You should
try to make a reasonable attempt to think about where digital
interventions might actually be useful to the company.
Why is this problem Please let us know in up to 100 words why this problem is important
important to solve to solve (e.g., to better manage cash flows if it is a corporate finance
use-case, or to better predict when a component might fail in asset
management, etc.)
High level concept / Think about issues like – what data would you need, where would
architecture to solve the you store it, how granular the data would need to be, what tools
problem would be needed to solve the problem, etc.
What tools and human This could cover things like data server packages, local IT infra,
talent would be needed to sensors (if sensors, what kinds),
solve the problem
Approximate cost incurred Please create a simple, line-item wise model to cover all the up-front
to solve the problem (i.e. and annual recurring costs needed to solve this problem (e.g., talent,
investment amount) servers, data center subscriptions, specific software packages, etc.)
Payback calculation of the Please quantify the benefit and impact of your suggested intervention
proposed investment in our operations and also show us the estimated payback calculation
of the same
Potential risks that we might What can go wrong in the implementation process (e.g., threat to life
face in implementation (and while installing sensors, dilution of core focus, etc.) and how do you
suggested mitigation ideas) propose to mitigate it
