Jon Wellinghoff: HData Explorer will change the energy sector

HData Explorer informs energy compliance by putting every number from any XBRL FERC form within easy reach.

Utilities, pipeline companies, and their regulators are about to get a crucial new comparison tool, says former FERC chairman Jon Wellinghoff in this new interview with HData CEO Hudson Hollister. Wellinghoff explains how HData Explorer, which takes advantage of new XBRL data collected and published by the FERC, would have saved him countless hours as a rate case litigator, advocate, and regulator.

Rate cases often depend on whether a utility’s expenses justify a rate increase. To prepare to argue a rate case, a utility, legal intervenors, and regulators carefully compare the utility’s financial reports with those of other companies, or to its own reports in the past. This is a manual process of downloading PDF documents, seeking out the right numbers, and plugging those numbers into spreadsheets for comparison and analysis. HData’s FERC Pro Data Hub, says Wellinghoff, makes this process automatic because Data Hub users can instantly pull up any number reported in FERC forms—or even a calculated formula based on multiple numbers, such as Rate Base—for any company or group of companies.

Wellinghoff also describes his service as chairman of the FERC. When requesting energy market analyses from FERC staff, Wellinghoff knew he was asking them to do hard work: manual data collection and spreadsheet computation. But new XBRL data, displayed and downloadable in the FERC Pro Data Hub, change the game. Regulatory staff will now be able to answer such requests from their management with the assistance of instant data analytics, allowing them to focus on interpretation, rather than collection or computation.