PUCN is nation’s first state utility commission to receive, analyze, and act on regulatory data in real time
CARSON CITY, NV, and BIRMINGHAM, AL – Today, the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada (PUCN) and HData, Inc., announced that the PUCN has implemented HData’s regulatory data analytics platform. HData’s platform allows the PUCN to access and automatically analyze reports from every electric utility in the United States within minutes of the information being filed with the federal government, facilitating instant, flexible comparisons between Nevada’s utilities and the rest of the industry.
In 2021, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) adopted a new, digital format for reports it collects from utilities, replacing its previous PDF document format, allowing instant data analytics to be applied to regulatory information for the first time. The newly implemented HData solutions make the PUCN the first agency in any state government to take full advantage of the federal agency’s digital transformation to support its mission.
HData provides instant business intelligence covering all of the federal filings that have been transformed from documents into data. The PUCN is a regulatory agency that oversees approximately 400 investor-owned utilities that are subject to laws enacted by the Nevada Legislature.
The PUCN’s basic regulatory duties include:
- To provide for fair and impartial regulation of public utilities.
- To provide for the safe, economic, efficient, prudent and reliable operation and service of public utilities.
- To balance the interests of customers and shareholders of public utilities by providing public utilities with the opportunity to earn a fair return on their investments while providing customers with just and reasonable rates.
“Regulators need to understand the entities we regulate in full context with the rest of their industries,” said PUCN Commissioner C.J. Manthe. “The FERC’s decision last year to replace regulatory documents with regulatory data, coupled with HData’s ability to apply analytics to such data instantly, will enable the Commission to benchmark Nevada’s utilities against the rest of the industry in thousands of ways, so that we can take fully-informed actions.”
“The HData platform allows us to build, review, and modify detailed peer comparisons in seconds, and to know the crucial features of a complex filing instantly,” said Anne-Marie Cuneo, PUCN Director of Regulatory Operations Staff. “From rate-case preparation to historical research and predictive insights, data analytics and related technologies built for our regulatory work, including our new HData platform, are helping us use our resources more efficiently.”
"We are proud to partner with the Public Utilities Commission of Nevada to deploy data analytics to improve utility regulation,” said Hudson Hollister, founder and CEO of HData. “The PUCN’s team knows the nuances of regulated utilities, and we are already learning new ways to make our platform better from this relationship.”
“Regulatory technology, or RegTech, stands to dramatically improve the operations of state utility commissions,” said Jon Wellinghoff, a member of HData’s Board of Advisors and former chair of the FERC. Wellinghoff also previously worked for the PUCN. “I look forward to see how the expertise of the PUCN’s team plus HData’s abilities in data science, economics, user experience, and software development combine to create better and more efficient utility regulation in Nevada and other states.”
HData’s platform uses regulatory data to automate compliance and business intelligence for electric utilities, gas companies and oil pipelines. The mission of the company, founded in 2018, is to digitize the interface between the regulatory and private sectors by creating and scaling platforms that take advantage of digital reporting.
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