Many creators of information systems, and the numerous users of those systems’ products and services, continually encounter a problem as old as information itself: understanding change.  

One way to understand change is to know why something changed. That change can be high level and profound (such as “why did the Federal Reserve change its policy rate?”) or it can be granular and minimal (“why did this sensor output vary from one minute to the next?”). Significant changes tend to have fulsome explanations and, just as importantly, high visibility. Small changes tend to have neither.  

Another way to understand it is how something changed. A number has increased or decreased from its previous value; a status has moved from one level to the next; a timeline has been accelerated, or blown out. These changes are all of a similar type, in the sense that they can be structured into a tabular format and compared from one point in time to another. 

Despite change being a constant in information systems, the documentation of that change is sometimes poor. Anyone who reads long-term projections of any kind, really, will read the latest version and immediately wonder, “OK, but what is different now?” Even if that information can be recorded and conveyed, it often is not. The result is often intensely frustrating: a sense of half-knowing that something has changed, but not the reason why; or that a change has occurred, but the change itself is not immediately apparent.  

That is why Halcyon is incorporating a software-oriented element into our data projects: a changelog. A changelog is a comprehensive record of all changes, from bug fixes to top-level features. A changelog is closely tied to the product itself, featuring a well-established informational structure. 

We believe the same effort would be worthwhile for tracking changes to the US gas power plant market, which we record in our Gas Power Plant Tracker (GPPT). Halcyon is updating GPPT monthly; we shipped our first version in June and our second to customers last week in mid July. Here’s the topline: Halcyon added 19 new gas-fired power projects under development in the US since June, and an additional 10 gigawatts of generation capacity. 

That’s a significant change, but it’s also one that’s easy to see. Something new, after all, does not need a set of precedent records; the relevant change is “it was not here before, but it is here now.” That is why Halcyon added a changelog to the tracker, too — 23 of the more than 110 plants that we are already tracking have 75 specific updates.

Some of those changes are minor, some are major, but all are logged. Here is a sample of some of those changes, with plant names anonymized: 

Plant online dates are changing; capex estimates are firming up; unit sizes are being disclosed; hydrogen-ready status are being revealed. Change is a common characteristic of large projects — it should be a feature of information products too. 

More detail about the latest Halcyon Gas Power Plant Tracker is here.

And, you can read more about our second data product, the Halycon Large Load Tariff Tracker, here. Here is how our chief data officer Alex Klaessig describes the case: 

“Large load tariffs are specialized electricity rate structures that determine how much a customer pays for their electricity use, designed for customers whose power demand is significantly higher than that of typical residential, commercial, or small industrial users. These tariffs are designed to allocate costs more equitably based on usage, ensure grid stability, and manage the financial risks associated with serving very large, often system-altering, loads — like those from data centers, industrial facilities, or other hyperscale users.”

If large load tariffs interest you, please reach out for pricing information. 

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