Facing a tight deadline to recommend whether the Puerto Rico Solar and Energy Storage Association should intervene in an integrated resource plan (IRP) proceeding, SESA-PR President PJ Wilson needed a way to quickly sift through 173 regulatory filings to find those aspects of the draft IRP related to distributed solar and storage.
Although he found that OpenAI’s application ChatGPT could not perform this task, when he asked it which AI program could do the job, it surprisingly suggested Claude Cowork, from competitor firm Anthropic.
Sure enough, Claude Cowork churned through the 173 filings in minutes, producing a complete summary of the draft IRP, including details of a proposed non-emergency virtual power plant that would aggregate distributed batteries, Wilson said in an interview with pv magazine USA.
Puerto Rico already has an emergency VPP that was activated many times last summer, Wilson said, avoiding neighborhood blackouts in emergencies by drawing power held in reserve from distributed batteries.
A non-emergency VPP could support the grid routinely, dispatching perhaps 50% of battery capacity daily, with a different compensation structure. That was a proposal that SESA-PR would not oppose and might favor, Wilson said.
The draft IRP also included an assumption about the annualized cost per kilowatt of battery capacity, and an outdated projection of distributed solar capacity through 2046.
Wilson took the information to SESA-PR’s board and gained approval to intervene in the IRP process.
The next step was deciding whether to engage in what Wilson calls a “full” intervention, which would take “significant” financial resources. So he used the Claude Cowork report as a fundraising document, asking members for which of the IRP issues they wanted to fund SESA-PR’s engagement.
Based on this experience, Wilson made the case for greater use of AI by policy staff in the solar and storage industry.
Without Claude Cowork, Wilson said that if he had time, he could have read the 173 filings himself, highlighting phrases in different colors. Or if he had sufficient funds, he could have hired a law firm or other provider to analyze the report, at a high cost per hour and with the need to disregard a number of filings, to control the cost.
But without those resources, he found he could rely on Claude Cowork. To verify the quality of Claude Cowork’s output, Wilson specified that the application should cite a source document and page number for each statement in its analysis. He spot-checked the results and found that they were accurate.
Using AI again for SESA-PR’s motion to intervene in the IRP proceeding, Wilson directed Claude Cowork to produce the first draft, modeled on the group’s previous motion to intervene. An attorney reviewed the draft before it was filed.
Another key capability of Claude for IRP proceedings, Wilson said, is that it can review the output of a utility’s least-cost capacity expansion modeling and suggest how the result would likely change if a “couple variables” in the analysis “were moved.” Claude can give enough information that an intervenor could call for the utility to rerun its analysis, “‘because we think the outcome will be in this ballpark,'” he said. “That can give the regulators a signal.”
Wilson is now completing a project to take YouTube recordings of regulatory hearings and automatically transcribe and summarize them, including a function that checks the spelling of speakers’ names and organizations.
Wilson said his “AI or die” statement for solar advocates is that “I’m pretty sure the fossil fuel advocates are already using these tools. As we’re advocating for what we believe is the most important thing compared to others, I don’t think there’s any choice but to fully embrace AI.”
SESA-PR is one of 22 state-level affiliates of the national solar trade group SEIA.
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