COMPASS: An Intelligent System for Automating Energy Infrastructure Regulation Management Using Large Language Models

COMPASS is an open-source tool developed by NREL that uses large language models to automatically collect and maintain state and local regulations related to energy infrastructure, providing intelligent regulation retrieval and analysis capabilities for energy project planning.

In the planning and site selection process of energy infrastructure projects, regulatory compliance review is an extremely complex and time-consuming task. Energy project developers in the U.S. need to deal with thousands of pages of regulations, ordinances, and permit requirements from the federal, state, and local levels of government. These regulations are scattered across various government websites, PDF files, and databases, with inconsistent formats and frequent updates, making manual collection and maintenance an almost impossible task.

A typical solar or wind energy project may require reviewing land use ordinances, environmental regulations, building codes, etc., from dozens of jurisdictions. Traditional practices rely on manual retrieval and lawyer reviews, which are not only costly but also prone to missing key information, leading to project delays or compliance risks.

INFRA-COMPASS (Infrastructure Continuous Ordinance Mapping for Planning and Siting Systems) is an open-source software tool developed by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). It innovatively uses the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to automatically collect, organize, and maintain a database of state and local regulations related to energy infrastructure from public sources.

The core goal of this project is to address the regulatory information fragmentation issue in energy infrastructure planning, providing developers, policy researchers, and planners with a unified, searchable, and continuously updated regulatory knowledge base. COMPASS uses the BSD-3-Clause open-source license, encouraging community participation and contributions.

The core innovation of COMPASS lies in using LLMs for unstructured document understanding and information extraction. The system's workflow includes:

• Web Scraping: Automatically access official websites of state and local governments to obtain regulatory documents
• Document Parsing: Process regulatory documents in multiple formats such as PDF and HTML
• Intelligent Extraction: Use LLMs to understand the semantics of regulatory texts and extract key information such as permit requirements, setback distances, height limits, etc.
• Structured Storage: Organize the extracted information into a standardized database format

Regulations are dynamically changing, so COMPASS has designed a continuous maintenance mechanism:

• Regular Scanning: The system automatically detects content updates on source websites
• Incremental Updates: Only process changed parts to improve efficiency
• Version Management: Track historical versions of regulations to support time-series analysis
• Quality Verification: Ensure data accuracy through cross-validation and manual review

COMPASS not only collects regulatory texts but also integrates relevant geographic information, project cases, and approval data to form a multi-dimensional knowledge graph, supporting complex query and analysis needs.

Energy developers can use COMPASS before project initiation to quickly understand the regulatory environment of the target area:

• Identify potential regulatory barriers and compliance requirements
• Compare the regulatory friendliness of different jurisdictions
• Evaluate the time and cost of project approval

Researchers can use COMPASS's database for macro analysis:

• Track the evolution trends of renewable energy policies across states
• Identify the impact of regulatory barriers on energy transition
• Provide data support for policy formulation