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Professional Briefing

💼Professional Briefing - May 11, 2026

Good morning. Back after a stretch off - here's where the industry sits.

⚡Energy & Compliance

📋Building Performance Standards

The June 1 deadline cluster is now 21 days out. Tier 2 documentation deliverables follow 30 days behind.

  • Oregon ODOE - Early Compliance Action & Planning Program funding round opens TODAY, May 11. Second round of the program. $1.2M total - ~$950K for Tier 1, ~$250K for Tier 2. Per-building incentives $10K–$50K depending on building type and size. Eligible activities include benchmarking, reporting, and energy audits. Applications close 5:00 PM, July 10. ODOE is hosting a guidance webinar May 15. Per ODOE's own framing, this is the single most actionable compliance-cost lever for Oregon owners right now - Tier 1 enforcement doesn't begin until 2028, but the application window for cost offset opens today.
  • Washington CBPS Tier 1 - June 1, 2026 (21 days out). Buildings 220,000+ sq ft must demonstrate compliance via the EUI target pathway or the investment-criteria pathway. EMP and O&M plans must be in place for any EUI-route submission. Tier 2 (90,000–220,000 sq ft) compliance is June 1, 2027, but the Tier 2 EMP/O&M plan deadline is July 1, 2026 (51 days out) - the documentation deliverable is 30 days behind the Tier 1 deadline, not a year behind it. Tier 2 exemption applications were due back in December (180 days before the mandatory date); that window is closed.
  • Colorado - June 1, 2026 annual benchmarking deadline (21 days out). The 2026 interim performance requirement has been formally removed; focus is on the 2030 BPS targets. Annual benchmarking report still due regardless.
  • Philadelphia Tier 1 - June 1, 2026 (21 days out). First year of compliance for buildings 220,000+ sq ft. Out-of-region but flag for any multi-market portfolios.
  • Oregon ODOE - new compliance/exemption forms still expected to release June 2026 per ODOE's running BPS update. Tier 1 enforcement begins 2028; the early-compliance window is the only practical lever for owners through 2027.
  • Idaho - Still on 2018 IECC with state amendments. No state BPS. The 2026 legislative session adjourned without advancing the 2024 IECC package; the state holds the line through at least the 2027 session.

Penalty exposure across the nine jurisdictions with active BPS laws still runs $100/day at the entry-level end to $268/ton CO₂ (NYC LL97), with documented exposure up to $7.5M for the largest buildings under DC BEPS's new 10,000+ sq ft threshold.

🔌Utilities & Programs

Avista 7.4% Idaho electric increase - in effect since May 1. Residential 939 kWh average bill moved from $115.54 to $124.44 (+$8.90/month, ~7.7%). The IPUC is still running its review process despite the effective date: virtual public workshops at 6:00 PM May 14 and 1:00 PM May 15 to take customer testimony. If you have clients who want their concerns on the record, those two windows are the formal venues this week. No reconsideration filings landed before the May 1 effective date.

Idaho Power PCA - June 1 effective date (21 days out). $51.56M, 3.02% average increase. Residential 3.16%, small general 2.72%, large general 3.50%, large power 3.69%, irrigation 2.96%. Combined PCA+FCA impact on a typical residential customer (900 kWh/mo) is about $3.64/month. The IPUC has not yet issued a final order, but the June 1 effective date remains in the docket. Stacks on top of the 9.74% general rate increase that took effect January 2026. Cumulative 2026 pressure on Idaho Power commercial customers is now well into double digits - flag to clients managing 2026 energy budgets.

Avista / Ford Hydro PPA - IPUC public comment closes today, May 11. Modified-procedure review (Order No. 37009). Three-year PPA replaces the agreement expiring June 30; if approved, the new term runs July 1, 2026 – June 30, 2029. Reply comments around May 18.

🏛️Idaho Energy Policy

HB 911 (Electricity, New Large Loads) - fully in effect. The IPUC approval process for new electrical loads of 50 MW+ at a single service entrance is the regulatory gate now. Service contracts must include a "no harm test" for existing customers, plus cost allocation, financial security, and dispute-resolution provisions. Direct response to data-center and Micron-scale demand on the Treasure Valley. Any project that could cross 50 MW needs to start IPUC engagement earlier than projects used to.

Idaho Power's 2025 IRP context - long demand curve is firming up. The IRP projects ~1,700 MW of new peak load over the 20-year window, with ~1,000 MW coming in the next five years. The plan calls for 1,445 MW of new solar between 2026 and 2033, plus 700 MW of wind and 450 MW of gas. That demand curve is the underlying driver behind both HB 911 and the 2026 rate pressure - useful framing in client conversations about why rates are moving every cycle.

Ada County solar - Blacks Creek/Meta-aligned project remains the marquee in-county project. The rPlus Energies 520 MWdc / 400 MWac Blacks Creek Energy Center, financed with a $650M package in early 2026, targets commercial operation 2027–2028 and is contracted to feed the Meta Kuna data center load. The separate ~1,700-acre solar conditional-use approval near the state prison complex from late December stands as the largest Ada County solar approval to date. The county's pending solar-on-prime-farmland ordinance still has not had a final Board of Commissioners vote since the April hearing; the amended language "strongly discourages" - rather than prohibits - industrial solar on prime farmland. Final vote remains TBD; Idaho Conservation League is still organizing comment.

Idaho net-metering - Reminder: IPUC's September 2025 order cut Idaho Power residential solar export rates by 31%. Next formal review window opens April 2028. Use post-September 2025 rates for any 2026–2027 residential PV modeling.

🎓Industry Events

  • ODOE BPS guidance webinar - May 15, on the Early Compliance funding round opening today.
  • IPUC Avista rate workshop - May 14, 6:00 PM, virtual. Public testimony window on the increase that took effect May 1.
  • IPUC Avista rate workshop - May 15, 1:00 PM, virtual. Second testimony window.
  • ASHRAE Idaho Presidential Visit - May 18, 10:30 AM–12:30 PM, Esther Simplot Park Pavilion (3206 W Pleasanton Ave, Boise). Lecture + Hawaiian BBQ.
  • ASHRAE Idaho Golf Lesson - May 29, 5:30–7:30 PM, Warm Springs Golf Course (2495 E Warm Springs Ave, Boise). Lead-in to the June tournament.
  • ASHRAE Idaho Golf Tournament - June 5, 8:00 AM–2:00 PM, Eagle Hills Golf Course, Eagle.
  • ASHRAE Annual Conference - June 27–July 1, JW Marriott Austin, TX.

💼Professional & Networking

The week's anchor is the IPUC Avista workshop on the 14th and 15th - if you advise on commercial energy budgets in Avista territory, sitting in (even silently) is the cheapest market intelligence available. ASHRAE's Presidential Visit on the 18th is the other in-person standout.

  • ULI Idaho - Full calendar at idaho.uli.org/events. The chapter calendar requires the authenticated portal to load fully; spring events have been clustered in the May 12–21 window in prior weeks.
  • Boise Metro Chamber / BYP - Calendar at web.boisechamber.org/events. Business After Hours remains the monthly anchor.
  • Boise Leaders Networking Group - Weekly noon luncheon. boisenetworking.com
  • Network After Work Boise - meetup.com/network-after-work-boise

🤖AI Brief

Two threads dominate this week. First, Anthropic's Wall Street rollout (May 4–5) and the funding speculation that followed - Anthropic is now reportedly weighing a $1T valuation in the round currently being shopped, up from the earlier-reported $900B mark, against a ~$30B annualized revenue run-rate. Second, agent infrastructure went mainstream: Claude Code shipped Auto Mode, AWS made the Agent Toolkit and MCP server generally available, and ServiceNow opened Build Agent into every major coding tool. The agent layer is consolidating fast.

🔧Tools & Models

  • Anthropic Claude Opus 4.7 - financial-services general availability (May 5). State-of-the-art on Vals AI Finance Agent benchmark (64.4%). Deployed at JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citi, AIG, and Visa. Roughly 10 reference-architecture finance agents ship with it: pitchbooks, earnings analysis, credit memos, underwriting, KYC, month-end close, statement audits, insurance claims. Microsoft 365 integration (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook) general availability - Claude functions as a single agent across the suite with context carried across apps. Moody's embedded its full credit/ratings platform as a native Claude app - credit analysis on 600M+ companies without leaving Claude. New connectors to Verisk, Third Bridge, Fiscal AI. Jamie Dimon publicly: "I want to know about asset swaps and Treasury bid-ask spreads… it created a huge dashboard, very accurate." For anyone running financial-adjacent reporting or modeling work, the toolchain is now native to Claude rather than bolted on.
  • Claude Code Auto Mode - released. The agent now picks the model and tools for each coding task on its own, with a two-stage classifier that filters safe operations and only escalates ambiguous/risky operations for review. Anthropic's framing is that the goal is for the majority of coding work to complete without per-step human approval, with human gates preserved for sensitive ops. The same release opened the Claude Agent SDK (formerly Claude Code SDK) to all external developers - the same core tools, context management, and permissions framework that power Claude Code. Stricter Auto Mode rules and an unconditional-block setting also shipped. If you maintain custom MCP servers or internal coding agents, the Auto Mode classifier surface and the SDK exposure are both new integration points.
  • AWS Agent Toolkit - GA May 6. Production-ready bundle of MCP servers, skills, and plugins for AI coding agents on AWS. 40+ skills across infrastructure-as-code, storage, analytics, serverless, containers, and AI services. Three plugins: AWS Core, AWS Data Analytics, AWS Agents (Bedrock-based). The AWS MCP Server is generally available, with IAM guardrails, CloudWatch/CloudTrail observability, and validated documentation retrieval baked in. No additional charge - pay only for AWS resources consumed. Supported clients: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Kiro, Cline, Windsurf. US East (N. Virginia) and EU (Frankfurt) at launch. If you've been hand-rolling MCP wrappers around AWS APIs, the supported product is now there.
  • ServiceNow Build Agent - GA May 6. Now extended into Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot, and acts as an MCP client pulling design specs from Figma, requirements from Miro, and code context from GitHub. Same governance plane in every tool. Notable for ServiceNow shops who want AI coding standardized across IDEs.
  • Chrome DevTools MCP. Official integration that exposes Chrome DevTools (page inspection, debugging) to coding agents via MCP, installable from NPM. Closes the loop for any agent doing front-end work that previously needed a separate browser-automation layer.
  • OpenAI GPT-5.5-Cyber - EU access announced May 11. OpenAI's cyber-tuned variant of GPT-5.5 made available to European policymakers, in limited preview for vetted cybersecurity teams. Read alongside Anthropic's gated Mythos release: OpenAI is positioning to fill the public-access gap Anthropic created.
  • OpenAI ChatGPT Ads Manager - opened to all US businesses (May 5). Self-serve beta; the prior $50,000 minimum was dropped. Smallest the on-ramp has been to date.
  • ElevenLabs - $500M ARR (disclosed May 5). Up from $350M at the end of December. Voice AI as a category is now a half-billion-dollar revenue line for a single vendor - useful data point in conversations about whether voice agents are real yet.

📈Business & Market

  • Anthropic - round now sized toward $50B at up to $1T valuation (FT, May 7). The earlier reporting was a $900B target; FT now reports investor demand could push it higher. Last round was February at $380B. Annualized revenue >$30B. Dario Amodei publicly cited "annualized growth of roughly 80x in one quarter" against an internal 10x projection. If Anthropic closes at or near a trillion, it overtakes OpenAI ($852B post-money from earlier this year) as the most valuable private AI company - striking against the backdrop of the Pentagon's May 1 Mythos-related exclusion.
  • Anthropic / Blackstone / Hellman & Friedman / Goldman Sachs - $1.5B JV (May 4). AI-native enterprise services firm targeting mid-market companies. Anthropic, Blackstone, and H&F each contributed ~$300M. OpenAI announced its own ~$4B version of the same concept the following day. Both bets are that the procurement bottleneck for mid-market AI adoption is implementation services, not models.
  • Alphabet - capex revised up to $190B for 2026 (from $185B), and the company is preparing its first-ever yen-denominated bond issuance to help fund AI buildout. The capex curve at the top of the stack is still bending up, not flattening.
  • Anthropic IPO - A public listing is widely expected in Q4 2026, with projections of >$60B raised. If you advise any portfolio that benchmarks against AI vendors, that calendar block matters for pricing and procurement leverage.

💡Worth Knowing

  • The MCP layer is now first-class enterprise infrastructure. AWS's official MCP Server, ServiceNow's Build Agent acting as an MCP client across IDEs, and the Chrome DevTools MCP integration all landed inside a single week. If your shop's AI roadmap still treats MCP as experimental, that posture is now a quarter behind where the platforms are.
  • Claude Code Auto Mode + Agent SDK opens up custom-agent territory. The same surfaces that power Claude Code (context management, permissions, tool routing) are now available to external developers. For internal-tooling work, the build-vs-buy calculus on coding agents shifts.
  • Claude 4 deprecation: June 15, 2026 (35 days out). Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 retire from the API. Audit any pinned model IDs in production. Opus 4.7 is the upgrade path; tokenization may shift token counts up to ~35%, so budget for the change.

🔗Worth Reading

Generated on May 11, 2026

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