U.S. energy regulators published over 9,000 documents in the past week. For energy professionals, these filings are full of gold: sales opportunities, consequential rule changes, and meaningful debates in which they need to make their voices heard. But the way to find the gold – using 60+ separate website document libraries of varying quality – makes the process long, painful, and invariably prone to missing key information.

Today, we’re pleased to introduce Halcyon Search, a comprehensive search engine for over 4.5 million (and counting!) U.S. energy regulatory filings, dockets, documents, and other authoritative information.

Search rapidly surfaces documents and dockets across all state Public Utility Commissions (PUCs), Grid Operators (ISO/RTOs), and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The solution is free and in open beta (which means that anyone can use it, but we’re not done working on it yet). Search offers features that aren’t available on most PUC websites: document and docket summaries, full-text keyword search, and customizable email alerts. Early feedback from our beta testers is that these features significantly improve research workflows.

Search, Not Answers

Energy professionals are extremely thorough researchers — their jobs depend on it. Their queries are complex, and oftentimes there is not a single “answer” to their question. Rather, there are multiple results that are responsive to their queries, and we view Search (which is deliberately named!) as the router between a litany of complex, multi-faceted questions and the authoritative sources and citations that these subject-matter experts can then use to inform their response.

Finding Search Use Cases

Suppose you’re a consultant helping a utility client write an Integrated Resource Plan (IRP). For the first time ever, you’re planning to include long-duration battery energy storage (LDES) in the preferred scenario. You can use Search to find past approved IRPs that modeled LDES, searching for the words “long-duration” within documents Halcyon has tagged as final draft IRPs, as shown here. 

On the other side of the table, imagine you’re a regulator at a Public Utility Commission, and you’re prosecuting a rate case with a multi-state utility. It’s your job to hold the utility to account and ensure the public’s money is spent prudently. You want to know that this utility is providing  costs that are consistent with what they’re representing to other state regulators. In this example, an Illinois regulator working with Ameren Illinois might find and assess Ameren’s rate-related proceedings in Missouri with a search like this.

Search can also help if you’re a data center developer prospecting potential sites. You might narrow your market to Texas and find power projects that have excess purchasable power. Search makes it easy to find recent Texas Certificates of Convenience and Necessity (CPCN), a filing that large power projects must procure. As a precursor, you might also start building Texas-specific market intelligence on large data centers, and search this.

Energy company regulatory affairs teams are one of the cohorts best served by robust search technology. For important dockets, these professionals must understand who’s advocating what position, and with what specific arguments. This knowledge allows them to strategically intervene, provide their own testimony, and advise their company on the likeliest outcome. Search makes it easy to list all comments in a docket – for example, here’s a straightforward search to find comments on Southern California Edison’s current general rate case.

Each of these specific examples ladder up to more general use cases:

• Needle in a haystack: I know exactly what document or docket I want, I just need help finding it;
• Narrow the universe: I have a general idea in mind and I want to identify relevant materials to begin researching;
• Build market intelligence: I have a specific topic, region, company, industry, and/or keyword that I want to monitor on an ongoing basis.

Regardless of your use case, we built Search to help you find what you’re looking for faster so that you waste less time navigating websites built in the 1990’s, and improve productivity doing the meaningful work of creating and enacting strategies for investment, growth, reliability, and security.

Search → Alerts

If you’ve heard of Halcyon, you’ve also heard of Halcyon Alerts — our free email-based alerting system that helps busy energy professionals stay up to date on the latest energy information. Given the complementary nature of Search and Halcyon Alerts, we prioritized making these two solutions work seamlessly together: Search users can create custom alerts by clicking the “Create Alert” action in the bottom right corner.

If a search result gives you information you need today, it’s now effortless to get updates when new documents that fit that criteria are published. (If you find a relevant docket, you can also follow it specifically and get ongoing alerts with a single click.) 

One recent example of an ongoing issue that’s worth following: MISO reported that it had overspent ratepayers money to the tune of $280 million per year because a single software vendor was calculating a tariff payment incorrectly. You can now follow that error in Halcyon here.

Search is live now, and it’s free. We warmly invite you to try it out! If it helps you or if there are things that could be better, please let us know at sayhi@halcyon.io.

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