How Halcyon Alerts help you manage the energy information age on your own terms

At Halcyon we have a quotes channel — a running log of the great (and occasionally hilarious) things our colleagues say. One of these colleagues contributed a phrase that has become something of a north star for me lately: our users are "time-poor and decision-rich."

It's a simple formulation, but it captures something real about what it means to work in energy right now. Up to $850 billion is being invested in U.S. power and digital infrastructure this year alone. State public utility commissions are generating more filings than ever. Every RTO/ISO, and federal energy agency is producing documents that matter. The information is all public. Almost none of it is manageable.

This is the problem Halcyon was built to solve.

In our Crawl, Walk, Run roadmap, Halcyon’s CEO, Bruce Falck, described the first phase of our platform: Alerts. Persistent, AI-powered queries that continuously monitor millions of documents across 71+ agencies and push synthesized, cited answers to your inbox, your dashboard, or wherever you need them. In Building the Stack, William Hakim laid out the technical architecture underneath — how search, queries, and alerts stack into something genuinely new. And in System, process, system, Nat articulated what we're building toward: not just a search tool, but a system of action: the layer that sits between external information and your internal processes of record.

Today, we want to give you something tactical. Here's how to make Alerts work for you, right now.

The problem with email (and why the information isn't the issue)

If you're getting Halcyon alerts by email, you already know something important: the information is valuable. The question is whether email is the right vessel for it.

Many of our most active users tell us the same thing: my inbox is inundated with alerts. I want the information, but not the email.

This is a good problem. It means the alerts are working — relevant filings are being surfaced, relevant signals are getting through. But an inbox full of alerts is its own kind of noise, and noise defeats the purpose.

We have a fix. From any alert email, click through to the alert on the platform, and toggle “Email notifications” off:

You'll still have full access to everything the alert surfaces. It will live on your Halcyon mini-feed on your new homepage at app.halcyon.io or your alerts feed at app.halcyon.io/alerts — but your inbox gets a break. The alert keeps running. The information keeps flowing. You access it on your schedule.

This is a small feature, but it reflects something we care about deeply. The goal was never to generate email volume. It was to give you a relationship with dynamic information that you can configure.

Curated alerts: the benefits of someone else's homework

One of the things we've worked hard on is translating the sprawl of energy regulatory activity into a set of topical categories that reflect how practitioners think about the market.

You can browse our full curated alert library at app.halcyon.io/alerts/browse. The categories span the full spectrum of the energy stack — from Wholesale Markets, Pricing & Adequacy to Data Centers & Large Load, from Energy Storage & Battery Programs to Grid Resilience, Cybersecurity & Storm Hardening, from Emerging Technologies, Pilots & Nuclear to Electrification & Electric Vehicles, and more.

You can view these categorically organized curated alerts either via the new Homepage (in the upper right hand corner click Browse alerts)

or by going directly to app.halcyon.io/alerts/browse and selecting View all for a drop down selector.

If there is a particularly meaningful category, you can bookmark it to watch for any new curated alerts on a particular theme (i.e. Data Centers, Large Load).

Think of curated alerts as a starting point, built by a team that reads this material every day so that you don't have to build from scratch. If you see one that fits your workflow, you can preview it before committing: click the alert name to see what a response looks like (i.e. Large Load ESAs – see the green box), then click Add Alert (or Copy Alert from the alert preview page) to add it to your alert feed or to receive an alert email.

This matters because of what Nat described in System, Process, System: a canonical information structure applied to a topic like large load interconnection or battery siting is more than an information feed. It is the start of one process, or even many processes, of decision-making and action. It becomes infrastructure for your workflow, not just a notification.

If there's a curated alert theme or alert we're missing, tell us: sayhi@halcyon.io. We mean that.

Advanced filtering: precision as a feature

In Building the Stack, William described a core architectural decision that informs how we build: optimizing for precision over recall. Our users, by and large, would rather have the most current answer from exactly the right source than a mostly correct answer from a sea of results.

That philosophy extends to alerts. Our recently updated Help Center article includes a new guide on advanced search filtering by filing type — and this is worth spending time with if you want to get the most out of alerts (and queries).

Filing type filtering lets you build alerts that are scoped not just to a topic or jurisdiction, but to the kind of document you care about. An alert focused on Transcripts (leveraging the Testimony and Exhibits filing type), for example, will catch the hearing transcripts from rate cases and major proceedings — not the administrative notices, not the procedural motions, but the substantive analytical record. That's a materially different information set, and it requires precision to isolate.

This is what the Halcyon stack makes possible: starting from a massive corpus of 7.2 million+ documents, and carving out exactly the slice that's relevant to your work.

Where this is going

Now for some vision (and one that is not too far off).

Right now, alerts operate in what we called the Crawl phase: monitoring a defined information space and surfacing relevant updates. That alone is a step change from manually tracking dockets or relying on keyword-based news services that miss the regulatory layer entirely.

But Crawl is just the foundation. In the Walk phase, we're building toward better addressing Totality Queries — complex multi-jurisdictional questions — via agentic workflows that don't just monitor a space but research it, decomposing what are effectively multiple different queries into sub-queries, running them across the full catalog, and returning structured, exportable outputs with every data point traced to its source filing.

And in the Run phase, the alerts infrastructure becomes the engine underneath something even more ambitious: custom data products, built agentically, that update continuously as new filings land. The structured energy trackers that today require months of analyst time to compile (hand-loaded, static, aging by the day) become living platforms that Halcyon maintains on your behalf.

What links all three phases is the architecture William described: search and filtering as the foundation, queries layered on top, alerts running continuously against that query layer, and data subscriptions as the output. Every improvement to the underlying stack — better metadata, faster re-indexing, more precise filing type classification — makes every alert smarter automatically.

This is the "system of action" we've been describing. Not a tool you query, but a platform that becomes integral to your processes of record — that learns the shape of your information needs and updates them, without requiring you to remember to check.

The north star

Back to the reality for those who work in energy right now and are "time-poor, decision-rich." The phrase captures a tension that no amount of information technology has fully resolved: more data, less time; more decisions, less slack. The energy buildout is compressing timelines everywhere. Rate cases that once moved slowly are becoming urgent. Interconnection queues are massive and moving fast. Capital allocation decisions that once had years of runway now have months.

The question we are building to answer is: what does it look like when your information infrastructure matches the pace of your decisions?

Alerts are the first chapter of that answer. The platform that manages your alert flow — that lets you tune signal vs. noise, browse curated categories, set precision filters, and access everything on your own time — is how we think about serving professionals who are time-poor and decision-rich.

There are a slew of things we're working on, but for today: configure your alerts, browse the curated library, turn off the emails if you need to, and let the information come to you.