Halcyon believes that building in public is an important part not just of demonstrating technology capabilities, but of developing them as well. We have been sharing elements of our work in public, but most of our efforts to date have been visible only behind a login.
After months of hard work, engagement with customers and design partners, and innumerable conversations with almost anyone active in energy transition, we’re VERY excited to have something to share more widely.
It comes from our experience with (and frustration with) an informational frontier:
known unknowns.
Any energy professional knows what sort of information will inform their decision making. They often know where it will come from: in the first instances, from company documents or more frequently, regulatory bodies such as commissions and agencies. But, that same professional may not know when it is coming (commission upload schedules set that tune). They also may not necessarily know who is providing the most important information (it could be a company, it could be a regulator, it could be a law firm, or even an engaged citizen). Awareness of an information challenge is high; discoverability of information is very low.
That frontier, though, is vast. Halcyon processes thousands of documents weekly just from institutions we already crawl and ingest, and we expect to scale that figure by orders of magnitude just to cover one part (electricity) of one country (the United States). Volume is a known known, but that doesn’t make it any less daunting.
Our realization, and our first solve for this combination of discovery and volume, is notifications. If a public service commission is a feed, and every document in it is ready for AI-driven classification and summarization, then the best way to discover information is not to look for it, but to have it served directly to you - pre-processed, contextualized, linked to source, simultaneously simple enough to pique interest and robust enough to enable further inquiry.
And that is what we are delighted to share with you: Halcyon notifications. Sign up for them here - and please tell us what you’d like us to add.
Today, energy practitioners can track specific dockets via automated emails from some PUCs, or they can read coverage from trade publications or independent editorialists. The former provides a very detailed focus on a singular topic whereas the latter offers higher-level context and insights on whatever topic strikes the author’s (or editor’s) fancy. Our hope is that Halcyon notifications can occupy a happy middle ground.
Here’s how it will work: we’re starting by offering notifications from seven US state public utility commissions — Arizona, California, Colorado, New York, Ohio, Virginia and Washington — and New Exempt Wholesale Generation Applications from FERC. Notification subscribers will receive one email per day per state with docket and document summarization and the exact document (not a filepath) for the underlying filing.
Documents underneath a docket will be grouped. Key players in any advice letter or proposed decision will be called out. Key figures will be highlighted, as will dates and timelines. Think of it as a way to supercharge your daily information reading, and accelerate your process of deciding where to go deeper, and how to share that need for depth with your team.
Here’s what it looks like:
An important callout: we are a startup and this is a beta product. We’re going to continue to experiment with different types of notifications, email formats, and subsequent actions you can take once you’ve received an email. In short, the product experience may change day to day; we’re looking for early adopters who value substance more than style and who share feedback early and often.
Sign up here, and you’ll be the first to receive our AI-driven notifications.
That’s our current state. The future state will have much more. We will introduce more public utility and public service commissions and US federal feeds at the top of the information funnel soon. We will also add functionality, such as the ability to subscribe to updates only on specific dockets or Federal Energy Regulatory Commission orders, and to subscribe to updates to integrated resource plans and requests for proposals across regions.
And, we plan to introduce topical and thematic notifications as well — tuned not to capture an organization or a market, but rather an area of cross-cutting importance. Think of distributed energy resources, or wildfire mitigation, or meeting data center electricity demand: concepts that are not bounded in space, and where knowing about where they are appearing for the first time is timely and directional.
For the last time, sign up for Halcyon notifications here.
Some logistics for you, as you sign up:
And, some housekeeping too:
And finally:
We believe that notifications will be integral to solving the unstructured information challenges that make today’s planning, investment, and building processes slower than they could be. Notification will be integral not just to information discovery, but to information processing workflows too. We are glad to have you join us as we build more of them, for more purposes, for greater depth, and for greater value.
Comments or questions? We’d love to hear from you - sayhi@halcyon.eco, or find us on LinkedIn and Twitter