One large operating utility is in front of its commission right now seeking a 2% distribution rate increase, roughly $400 million in added annual revenue, to cover poles, lines, transformers, and the crews who maintain them. Commission staff have countered at closer to $280 million.
The exact same regulator recently stood up a separate pricing structure for the data centers crowding onto the grid and lifted a moratorium on new connections.
What does this amount to? A single utility going to the exact same commission with several proceedings, each with its own record to build and defend, and each on its own clock. This is the shape of the job now.
The money moving through rate cases has grown fast, with federal energy data showing regulators authorized about $9.7 billion in net electric rate increases in 2023, more than double the $4.4 billion authorized in 2022.
Despite these large numbers, commissions only approved roughly 58% of the net increases electric utilities requested across 2023 and into 2024.
The gap between what a utility files and what it recovers is real money. The case above is a live example: a roughly $400 million ask, trimmed by staff toward $280 million, with the difference decided on the strength of the record.
Behind the filings sits a capital build unlike anything in recent memory. Investor-owned utilities are planning on the order of $1.1 trillion in capital spending from 2025 through 2029, nearly as much in five years as the entire prior decade. Every dollar of that build has to be justified, allocated, and defended in a proceeding before it earns a return. More capital plus load growth from electrification and data centers plus cost pressure equals more cases, filed more often, each carrying a bigger number and a heavier evidentiary load.
For a chief utilities officer running gas and electric operations across several states, this becomes a rolling portfolio of rate cases, staggered across jurisdictions that each want the data their own way.
Rate strategy, expert testimony, and legal framing matter, but they sit on top of an operational machine that assembles and defends the record: cost of service studies, rate base rollforwards, workpapers tied back to the general ledger and the work management system, and more.
Then the discovery: hundreds of data requests from commission staff, consumer advocates, and intervenors, each with a deadline, each expecting an answer that reconciles to every other answer you have already given.
If you miss a tie-out, you hand the other side an argument. Answer slowly and you extend regulatory lag, which is money. Answer inconsistently across two concurrent cases and you create a problem that outlives the docket.
Most utilities run this machine on spreadsheets, shared drives, email threads, and a handful of people who carry the logic in their heads. It works until it is three cases at once, or until the analyst who knew how the allocation really worked retires after thirty years.
The utilities that will pull ahead are the ones that stop treating each rate case as a from-scratch scramble and start treating the evidence record as a standing, instrumented process.
In practice that means a few specific things: a single source of truth for case data, wired to the general ledger, the work and asset systems, and the capital plan, so a workpaper traces to its origin instead of to someone's local file. A managed intake and response workflow for data requests, with routing, ownership, deadlines, version control, and a full audit trail, so nothing sits unassigned and every answer is defensible six months later. Reusable, jurisdiction-aware templates for cost studies and schedules, so a filing in one state is a starting point in the next rather than a blank page. And a clean, permanent record of who answered what, when, and on what basis.
AI has a real place inside that process, though not the place the hype suggests. It is not writing your rate case, but:
drafting first-pass responses to routine data requests and pointing them at the right source
flagging where a new answer contradicts one already in the record
summarizing thousands of pages of intervenor testimony into the handful of issues that actually need a witness
checking a schedule against the workpapers behind it before staff does
Your people keep the final judgement, but the manual assembly, reconciliation and cross-checking, the work that burns nights and weekends and still leaves room for error? That is what moves off their desks.
Frame it the way the good operators already do: the filing is not going away. The commission is not going to ask for less. So the advantage goes to the utility that can turn a case faster, defend it more cleanly, and recover its capital sooner, without adding headcount for every new docket.
Macedon was founded in 2009 as a process-design and AI transformation firm that builds this kind of operational backbone for large, regulated enterprises. Our practitioners have spent years working with rules that keep changing, evidence that has to reconcile, and audit trails that have to hold up under examination. We then build practical software to address business needs, and we have done it more than 800 times across 100+ clients, with a 9.7 out of 10 client satisfaction score.
If your team is carrying a growing rate-case load on spreadsheets and a few key people, we will walk your regulatory operations with you and show you where a process backbone would take the weight off. Request a regulatory operations review.
Want to continue the discussion? Schedule a chat with Tom.