Regulatory risk rarely announces itself clearly, or conveniently. More often, it shows up quietly: a filing buried in a docket, a white paper posted under the radar, a policy shift hinted at in a footnote rather than a headline. By the time it becomes obvious, the window to shape the outcome may already be closing.
At LET'S GO! 2025, HData's annual customer conference, regulatory leaders from NextEra Energy Transmission and Washington Gas joined a panel on how proactive regulatory monitoring has changed the way their teams work. Amy Lowe, Director of Regulatory Affairs at NextEra Energy Transmission, and Laura Storino, Director of Federal Regulatory Strategy at Washington Gas, shared how moving from reactive to proactive monitoring has helped them act faster, reduce risk, and build more resilient regulatory teams.
For years, regulatory teams stayed informed the same way: by piecing it together through trade publications, manual docket searches, email lists from agencies or pipelines, and tips passed along by word of mouth.
That patchwork approach worked, until it didn't.
"As a FERC nerd, I might be in the FERC library every day," Storino said, "or I might see something in a trade magazine. The process was really disparate."
Disparate processes introduce delay, and delay introduces risk. As filing volumes climb and issues move faster across state and federal dockets, a monitoring approach built on habit and luck leaves regulatory teams finding out about developments after the fact, rather than as they happen.
For Lowe, proactive monitoring became essential as her team tracked state-level efforts to reintroduce rights of first refusal (ROFR) that could disadvantage competitive transmission developers like NextEra.
Shortly after her team set up HData alerts around the issue, they caught a white paper that had been filed quietly, one that supported arguments counter to NextEra's interests. Knowing about it early made all the difference.
"We were able to get it within less than an hour or two of it being posted," Lowe said. From there, her team moved quickly: they used AI summaries to analyze the filing, identified misinformation within it, coordinated with communications, and distributed rebuttal points internally, all within 24 hours.
Without proactive monitoring, that filing might have circulated unanswered long enough to shape the narrative before NextEra had a chance to respond.
Monitoring is the first step, and the most important steps follow: knowing when, and how, to act. For a regulatory team, nearly every HData alert raises the same set of questions: Do we simply watch this issue? File a standard intervention? Escalate to a protest or a comment in support? Loop in legal or leadership?
"The next steps are things we would have done without HData," Storino said. "But they're much quicker."
That's the real difference proactive monitoring makes: not a new set of decisions, but the speed and context to make the decisions a team was always going to face. Having enough information early is what turns a judgment call into a confident one, and what helps a team tell the difference between noise and a true signal before it's too late to matter.
For both panelists, proactive monitoring is both a risk-reduction tool and a way to build institutional knowledge in newer team members.
Storino described using daily HData alerts to spark conversations with newer analysts, walking them through why a particular filing matters, even one from another company on an unfamiliar issue.
"The analyst has no clue why I would care about that," she said. "So it just generates that discussion. And that's a big deal."
Lowe sees the same benefit from a different angle. Her team uses AI summaries to help new hires get up to speed on regulatory terminology, docket structures, and the history behind a proceeding—context that once took years on the job to absorb.
"We use it a lot to get her education up to speed," Lowe said.
In an industry where institutional knowledge often walks out the door with retirements and turnover, that kind of built-in training matters as much as the risk mitigation.
Some regulatory risks are obvious. Others are quieter, and easier to miss until they resurface years later.
Lowe shared a cautionary example from before her team adopted proactive monitoring: a compliance filing that was never submitted after an attorney went on leave. No sanctions followed at the time. Years later, the gap surfaced anyway.
"By monitoring our company's name, I can tell if a filing's been made," Lowe said. "That way it doesn't fall through the cracks."
Monitoring a company's own name, filings made on its behalf, and even filings that should have been made but weren't, has become a quiet but critical control for teams that can't afford a compliance gap to go unnoticed.
The biggest shift Lowe and Storino described is a change in mindset.
Before proactive monitoring, regulatory intelligence at both organizations was scattered across sources, inboxes, and institutional memory. Afterward, it became centralized, searchable, and shareable across the team, supporting faster decisions, better collaboration, and fewer surprises. For NextEra Energy Transmission, that has meant catching adverse filings within the hour instead of the news cycle. For Washington Gas, it has meant turning routine alerts into a daily training ground for the next generation of regulatory talent.
As filings accelerate and scrutiny increases across the energy sector, seeing issues early may be the difference between a team that reacts to outcomes and one that helps shape them.
Lowe and Storino’s full session and other videos at LET'S GO! 2025 are available for download. For more on AI built specifically for the regulatory work of utilities, regulators, advocates, and other energy professionals, visit hdata.com.
For more on how HData's proactive monitoring helps regulatory teams see risk before it becomes a headline, request a demo.
As the AI-native operating system for energy regulation, HData serves the largest customer ecosystem in regulated energy, helping utilities, regulators, advocates, advisory firms, corporates, and energy technology companies navigate regulatory complexity. Through centralized data, domain AI, and purpose-built applications, HData accelerates the research, analysis, and workflows critical to how the future of energy is decided.