For utilities and other energy companies, grappling with complex regulations has always been a hurdle. The data landscape has long been fragmented, requiring teams to devote valuable time and pull together multiple sources of information to monitor regulatory changes — much less understand market trends at scale.
This is the context into which two companies launched their respective regulatory data platforms in the last decade: HData, a platform for compliance and energy regulatory data, and the trade group Advanced Energy United’s Insight Engine project, which incorporates policy insights and summaries into its own database of regulatory documents.
Today, the two projects are becoming one. HData is acquiring Insight Engine, Latitude Media has learned.
As a result of the transaction, HData will establish what CEO and co-founder Hudson Hollister describes as “the largest customer community in energy regulation,” of nearly 200 distinct entities. These will include utilities and other energy companies, regulators, power producers, consulting and financial institutions, and software companies. (Advanced Energy United will continue to act as an energy industry association focused on regulatory and legislative reform.)
Both platforms — which will remain distinct entities under the HData umbrella, with the Insight Engine platform continuing to incorporate insights from the Advanced Energy United team — are powered in part by artificial intelligence. HData’s technology, for example, “can interpret an entire rate case in seconds,” Hollister told Latitude Media, and then “can support that interpretation with citations down to the paragraph level from all the source documents.”
This tool is valuable to users in part because it promises speed.
“Energy regulation is one of the primary blockers for all or all of the changes that need to happen to transform our energy supply and to get the necessary transmission infrastructure built,” Hollister said. “It’s a problem of regulation, and part of that problem can get solved through technology.”
This potential to accelerate the regulatory process couldn’t come at a better moment. The expanded HData’s user base are all grappling with unexpected load growth and the need to build and connect more energy, fast.
“I’ve known for years that Insight Engine was aimed at the same problems as HData: at making sense of this vast morass of millions of pages of complex regulatory documentation that governs what utilities are allowed to build, and what’s cost effective for them to buy,” Hollister said, adding that this alignment is what brought the two companies together initially.
Hollister declined to disclose the terms of the deal, but said that conversations with Advanced Energy United began earlier this year, after years of crossing paths at National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, or NARUC, conferences.
After the acquisition, the two platforms together will cover the dockets of every state in the U.S., as well as of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and publicly available filings from ISOs, RTOs, and certain other select agencies. “Our customer count is going to more than double as a result of this transaction,” Hollister said. “The customer bases are complementary.”
Some of these users, like utilities and utility commissions, may be opposed to each other in certain proceedings, Hollister said, but by using the same source of data they can zero in on the true points of disagreement “and then negotiate over those,” rather than negotiating about the data itself. Essentially, the platform aims to provide a common language.
From here, Hollister said the company will consider a move into private as well as public data. The company is already working with some of its customers to combine their internal data with these publicly available libraries. The platform already has the capacity to do this, in fact; it will just require collaboration with customers to roll it out at scale.
For instance, a PG&E employee could hypothetically log into their HData account and peruse both internal files and what the California Public Utility Commission is working on, Hollister said — and even ask how a particular issue is likely to impact PG&E, based on the technology’s interpretation of how CPUC is dealing with its peer utilities.
“When that is fully mature, what that means is our customers can grab intelligence and interpretation simultaneously from whatever is public and from whatever is internal,” he added.
