December 1, 2025
In today’s energy sector, regulatory complexity is not a temporary headache—it is the new normal. Utilities face an accelerating torrent of mandates from multiple levels of government. This includes FERC reliability standards, EPA emissions rules, state-level renewable portfolio standards, cybersecurity requirements under NERC-CIP, and emerging distributed energy resource (DER) interconnection rules. Add differing state implementations of the Inflation Reduction Act, and the result is a compliance landscape that changes almost quarterly.
For many utilities, the traditional response of spreadsheets, manual tracking, and armies of consultants, has reached its breaking point. A single missed filing or misinterpretation of a new tariff can trigger eight-figure penalties, forced outages, or reputational damage. In 2024 alone, FERC issued over $50 million in civil penalties, many tied to documentation and reporting failures that automated systems could have prevented.
This is where automated compliance platforms become a strategic necessity rather than a nice-to-have. AssurX compliance software solution automates three critical things that compliance professionals and static processes simply cannot do at scale.
Real-time regulatory visibility
Modern compliance platforms unify data from across the enterprise such as FERC filings, state commission updates, regional standards publications, system logs, asset data, and external evidence sources. This is done by ingesting information from dozens of systems as soon as it becomes available. Instead of manual searching, teams get a single place where regulatory documents, standards updates, and operational data are organized, searchable, and ready for analysis. While interpretation always stays with the compliance experts, the system ensures the most current information is at their fingertips the moment it’s published.
Workflow orchestration across silos
Compliance obligations rarely live in one department. A new capacity market rule might require coordinated updates from market operations, legal, engineering, and finance. Automation creates dynamic checklists, routes tasks, sets deadlines, and maintains an immutable audit trail that satisfies even the most aggressive regulator.
Continuous evidence collection
Instead of scrambling for data during an audit, automated systems pull evidence directly from SCADA historians, EMS logs, settlement systems, and training platforms. When FERC requests proof that operators completed annual blackout restoration drills, the system delivers signed records, timestamps, and video verification in seconds.
How to Maintain Compliance and Continuous Improvement
A real-life example of a utility taking advantage of automation is VELCO (Vermont Electric Power Company). VELCO uses AssurX to perform gap analysis for regional self-certifications and internal assessments. Dashboards allow the NERC compliance team to track and monitor requirement deadlines. This provides strong controls in managing the many requirements affecting multiple departments that have to be tracked on an annual basis. Their NERC audit scope was cut by nearly 50% leveraging AssurX.
Compliance Automation Is the Key To Success
In an era of regulatory whiplash, the winners will be utilities that treat compliance not as a cost center but as a technology problem. Those who continue to rely on manual processes will find themselves perpetually behind the curve—reacting to yesterday’s rules while regulators write tomorrow’s. Automation is no longer optional. It is the only realistic way to convert regulatory chaos into manageable, auditable, and cruciall predictable risk.
About the Author
Kathryn Wagner is Vice President, Industry Solutions, Energy & Utilities at AssurX. Kathryn brings more than 25 years of experience in manufacturing systems integration and compliance while being responsible for the development and evolution of product offerings for NERC compliance and related systems that focus on reliability and resilience.
