I am not a management consultant, nor was I ever one (nor, as the old advertising trope goes, did I play one on TV¹). That said, enough time in the information business has given me a sense for the value of mental models and heuristic devices to help us understand complex systems.  

The energy system is both massive, and massively complicated. It is trillions of dollars of infrastructure, both robust and intricate, designed to operate in extremes and within incredibly tight tolerances, and essential to modern life. Its complexity is one of the reasons that strategists spend so much time building models to understand interaction between elements, and to carefully plan out system additions with an operational life measured in decades.  Transmission system maps become simplified line drawings; energy flows become Sankey diagrams, and our understanding of the energy sector 25 years from now becomes a spreadsheet.

That abstract understanding requires concrete information, of course, and systematizing and harmonizing it — and making it approachable and queryable for the purposes of decarbonization — is Halcyon’s prime goal today. But in doing so, we need to have our own abstract understanding of how information is organized. And so, we have developed something familiar to any consultant or strategist: a simple two by two. 

For our purposes working on behalf of customers, we see energy transition information living in a grid of public and private, supply and demand.  

Public information is widely available, and generally quite efficient in terms of distribution and access. It includes state regulators’ dockets and proceedings, electricity balancing authority and federal entity forecasts, filings from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and myriad corporate filings, disclosures, and presentations. Importantly, much of it is tabular, easily read by machine, and probably already integrated into your workflow. 

Private information (as we see it) is either held outside of public view, or is highly obscured even if it is technically public. It includes information such as asset portfolios, the many thousands of limited liability companies that own assets, complex generator interconnection files, and a great deal of information at state and local levels, much of it nearly impossible to locate without deep prior knowledge of antique information systems. 

Matching these two categories are supply and demand. Supply is physics and chemistry: the generation of electrons and the transformation of molecules. Demand is, at root, the economy writ large. Rates of economic growth determine energy consumption, and the nature of its growth determines where and how that consumption manifests. Changes in industry and sector focus alter the energy mix (as today’s booming data center demand attests) and policy and regulation, woven through all of it, forces or incentivizes change.

Heuristics are necessarily simple (that’s what makes them heuristics), but it is the simplicity which makes them useful. For Halcyon, this two by two lets us consider, when ingesting new information, what quadrant it occupies and how widely that information is already distributed.  Crawling the SEC’s site for 10-K filings is easy, quick, and efficient…but that also means it’s already widely done as well. Ingesting state-level certificates of public convenience and necessity is more of a private effort; gathering local planning meeting minutes is more private still, but that difficulty and opacity is what makes it worthwhile.  

Energy transition information from any source will tilt towards one corner of this graph but of course may not be crystal clear as “Public - Supply” or “Private - Demand.” However, diligent effort can make it more clear, and allow that information to become more valuable. 

Ultimately, an information system supplies value not just by mapping information into quadrants like we do, but by changing the state of information within those quadrants. US transmission interconnection queues, for instance, are already public and structured in terms of dates, project names, and capacities, but all of the other associated asset-level information (ultimate owners, current documentation, federal state and local statuses) are essentially obscured and unstructured. There is value in coordinating diverse information into one frame.  

And there is value in casting the same logic that defines energy supply (public interconnection queues) onto energy demand (creating an analogous understanding of where energy demand will emerge in a public, interactive, and interoperable way). 

At Halcyon we will continually refine this two by two. And, we will always view it as mutable.  Success, and value, comes from deriving structured information from unstructured contexts, and in doing so accelerating better decision making. 

¹ An old, but durable, reference to actor Chris Robinson who played Doctor Rick Webber on the daytime soap opera General Hospital from 1978 to 1986

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