Sharon Reishus is currently an advisor to Halcyon and is a former state utilities regulatory commissioner. She has been analyzing PUC filings for over 30 years as an energy policy consultant and utility sector strategist. This is the second part in a two-part series on Halcyon’s Docket profiles — read part one here.

A game-changer for PUC docket analysis: automating docket intuition
After spending over three decades analyzing Public Utilities Commission (PUC) filings across virtually all fifty US states, I've developed what colleagues of mine called "docket intuition" — that hard-won ability to quickly parse through thousands of pages and instinctively zero in on what matters most. But I'll be the first to admit: it's an incredibly inefficient process that our industry just has to deal with. 

That's why Halcyon's new Docket profiles feel like such a breakthrough.

Today’s painful reality of docket analysis
Let me paint a picture of what my typical day might have looked like before Docket profiles. In the last month, I have needed to analyze the scope of a long-running grid modernization docket in Colorado, look for wildfire-related expenses in a rate case in California, review the details of an energy storage incentive program in Connecticut, and monitor new updates in a distributed energy resources proceeding in New York. Practically, this meant:

• Manually downloading hundreds of PDFs from sometimes-cranky PUC websites
• Creating my own tracking system in Excel to map key stakeholders
• Spending hours skimming through technical testimony, transcripts, and briefs to find relevant sections
• Attempting to summarize complex positions of utilities and multiple intervenors
• Racing to catch up whenever new filings appeared in a docket

A single comprehensive analysis could take days, sometimes weeks, depending on the docket's complexity and duration. And no matter how thorough you are, there's always a completeness problem: that nagging feeling that you might have missed something important buried in page 147 of a technical appendix.

A new approach: technology for practitioners
What strikes me about Docket profiles is how well they understand the analyst workflow. Halcyon’s verticalized-AI approach doesn’t just throw LLMs at the problem – it's clearly built with deep industry knowledge. Here's why this matters:

1. Energy-Specific Context: Halcyon’s knowledge graph means the system actually understands what "BESS" or "DERMS" means in context. I can't count how many times I've tried using general-purpose search tools only to get tripped up by the energy industry's endless acronyms and technical terms.
2. Comprehensive Metadata Organization: Having a single, uniform presentation of metadata across different state PUCs is simply huge. Anyone who's tried to track multiple dockets across different states knows how maddening it is to deal with 50 unique websites, docket filing systems, and nomenclatures. Docket profiles present standardized information that looks the same across PUCs.
3. Automated Updates: Crawling and indexing new documents daily is a game-changer. I've spent countless hours manually checking PUC websites for updates, often missing critical filings simply because I failed to check every docket every day — or, if I had signed up with those PUCs that offered their own docket notification system, I would just as often miss it in my inbox. Halcyon’s customizable alerts can aggregate docket filings across multiple states into a single email delivered on a frequency I choose, and, most importantly, proactively provides a brief summary of every filing in the alert — that summary capability alone is an amazingly helpful tool. 

As with any new tool or technology, it is worth asking the counterfactual: could I use something else to do the same thing? Maybe, but not really. Like other practitioners, I’ve used several LLM offerings to try to save myself time, and many of those AIs do an excellent job of summarizing complex PDFs. But to use them, you typically first need to identify and extract documents from a PUC website, then download them into the chat box (five at a time) so that the LLM can summarize them — it is still incredibly tedious, time consuming, and doesn’t match what Halcyon’s technology accomplishes. These other research tools are good at some things, but they lack Halcyon’s energy-industry-specific knowledge and extensible platform architecture, which limits their usefulness. 

See Docket profiles for yourself:

• California Public Utilities Commission - Docket A2308013
• Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities - Docket 24-187
• Illinois Commerce Commission - Docket T22-0081

Real-world impact
Here’s an example that contextualizes just how helpful these Docket profiles actually are. Consider a five-state project where I needed to analyze renewable energy procurement within large integrated resource planning (IRP) dockets over the last few years. Traditionally, this might have taken me a week or two of full-time work, locating and working my way through filings in each docket, trying to hone in on the most important documents. Typically I would open every document in a docket and skim each one to determine what they even were. With Docket profiles, I can now:

• Quickly review the main issues being examined in the docket via the executive summary
• See the proceeding’s schedule at a glance and compare timelines
• Identify key stakeholders and understand intervenor positions 
• Track parallel developments across multiple jurisdictions
• And crucially, do the above four relatively quickly so I can focus my deep-reading time on truly critical documents

Now, everyone’s mileage will vary based on their specific need and analysis type, but for me, this yielded roughly a ~5:1 time savings, reducing a week+ of analysis into a single day. 

And while the time savings are significant, what's even more valuable is the ability to be more thorough and comprehensive in my analysis. Subtle connections between dockets that might have taken months to surface could now be identified and extracted much more quickly.

The power of integrated tools
Earlier I mentioned Halcyon’s ‘extensible platform architecture.’ What makes Halcyon's approach particularly effective is how it has integrated Docket profiles with their free Halcyon Alerts email notification system. Like alerts, Docket profiles are free to anyone with a Halcyon account (sign up!); Docket profiles can be accessed by clicking on the related docket number in the email alert or via free docket search, bringing you to a thorough, always-on, always-current AI-powered summary of the entire docket, recent filings with their own summaries, proceeding timelines, etc.

As someone who tracks current developments across multiple states and topic areas (particularly data center developments, lately), having topically organized customizable email alerts for new PUC filings has streamlined my workflow considerably. Being able to jump directly from an alert email to a comprehensive docket profile page means I can immediately understand the context and implications of any new filing.

Looking ahead
I'm particularly excited about Halcyon’s planned developments for more sophisticated search capabilities and monitoring systems. The combination of timely alerts and detailed profiles creates a powerful toolkit for regulatory analysis. As someone who regularly needs to track specific issues across thousands of pages, having tools that go beyond basic keyword searching will be invaluable.

The energy sector is at a critical juncture, with unprecedented levels of regulatory activity around clean energy transition, grid modernization, and rate reform. Technology like this isn’t just convenient – it’s becoming essential for anyone trying to stay on top of regulatory developments.

After years of making do with basic tools and manual processes, it's refreshing to see technology that actually understands the unique challenges of PUC docket analysis. Halcyon's approach could fundamentally change how we interact with regulatory information, making the insights buried in these crucial documents more accessible and actionable than ever before.

Comments or questions? We’d love to hear from you - sayhi@halcyon.eco, or find us on LinkedIn and Twitter