A New Coalition for a Distributed Energy Future — Episode 245 of Local Energy Rules

Katherine Hamilton:
Part of this is being able to really bring everything to bear for the consumer and for the grid writ large.

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John Farrell:
Can you imagine a future where you’re earning money, helping to support the electric grid? Or a network of your distributed assets from a smart thermostat to solar to an electric car and your neighbors and traditional sources like power plants all work together to make the grid work better for everyone? If you’ve had a hard time seeing that future, then the new coalition Common Charge, wants to make the picture clearer. Acting executive director Katherine Hamilton joined me in September, 2025 to describe how this new partnership of nonprofit organizations and businesses aims to create a system where people hold the power, bills shrink, and the grid grows stronger.
I’m John Farrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. And this is Local Energy Rules, a podcast about monopoly power, energy democracy, and how communities can take charge to transform the energy system.

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John Farrell:
Katherine, welcome to Local Energy Rules.

Katherine Hamilton:
Thank you so much. I’m so glad to finally get onto your show. I had to start a new group to do that.

John Farrell:
It’s so kind of you to say so. And it is my pleasure to have you on here because I’ve listened to you many times over the years on your own podcast and another podcast. So having you here is lovely.
So I wanted you to come here and talk about this new organization, Common Charge, ILSR is a member, full disclosure. It just launched, and I’m hoping you can kind of set the stage for people understanding the importance of this organization by explaining why do we need it, what has been missing that this organization, that this coalition, can do.

Katherine Hamilton:
Exactly. And that’s the perfect setup question because this comes to a very personal experience I’ve had in several markets myself, I was representing a business group called Advanced Energy Management Alliance, and I spent a lot of time in MISO South, which is a hard place to work if anybody’s ever done that. And I would find myself in a state where there would be the Sierra Club, there would be my group, and there would be the utility. And the utility would always win. And it wasn’t because the Sierra Club and the business group weren’t aligned, because we were. We were basically singing off the same song sheet, although we came from a different place. And when Jeff Kramer from the Coalition for Community Solar Access reached out and just was pulling together people to talk through something like this, I said, oh my goodness, we need to connect those dots. We need an organization that allows us all to pool our power, to pool our resources, to amplify the capacity that we each have so that we can really make a difference. And so we can get distributed assets in the hands of people. We’re all trying to do it. We’re just all very disaggregated or distributed and trying to pull us together into a common voice would be crucial. So we started that about a year and a half ago, that conversation, and it is finally coming to fruition.

John Farrell:
So tell me a little bit about what the vision is. So if this organization, Common Charge, is wildly successful, what would it mean as an energy consumer and how might it change the production and delivery of electricity?

Katherine Hamilton:
So as a consumer right now, you’re locked out of a lot of options and some of the options are all the distributed asset options are all put in a little box and it has a label on it that says pilot. And if you’re not a part of the pilot in that box, you don’t have access to them. So we want to unlock those so that consumers can get whatever they want on their distributed side so that they can save money, they can save energy, and they can make their spaces, whether it’s a home or business, much more efficient and much more resilient. So those are things that we think are really at a precipice right now, affordability and resilience, and that we can address those through this collective action. So if you have distributed assets available to everyone, everyone might choose different things, but they would at least have choices.
They’d be able to kind of control their own future of their business or home. And then we would also be able to use those assets as part of the full system. So it would benefit the whole grid. Right now the grid is looked at as you have the supply side and then you have the demand side. And so consumers are just considered load. Well distributed assets changes that equation completely because it allows the consumer to also become an asset to the system and become a resource. And if we’re wildly successful, then it would be fungible, the supply and demand sides would be equal. We would be able to have people coming in with resources on either side of the grid and it would make everything better for everybody.

John Farrell:
And just to make this concrete, so I’m thinking about in my house, I have a smart thermostat, I have a heat pump, I have solar panels. Some combination of those things ought to set me up to participate in programs where I could offer something to the grid as well as be a consumer. But right now I don’t have anything that I can do with my current utility. And you’re saying that’s the idea, that people who have these different distributed assets are going to be able to actually make a meaningful contribution back to the system and maybe even get their bill reduced as a trade off for that?

Katherine Hamilton:
Exactly. Absolutely. And you know that there’s some programs like air conditioning programs, demand response programs have been around for decades. Co-ops especially have been really good at that. And those are very simple programs. You lower your temperature a little bit or turn your air conditioning on and off in the old days is what they would do. That’s been around for a long time, but there’s so much more now available to consumers and we all to be able to use it all and it’s all available at different times of the day. So it might be that you’re not home and you don’t need to use your battery or your solar and maybe the grid would benefit from that. So part of this is being able to really bring everything to bear for the consumer and for the grid writ large. And when you benefit the grid writ large, you benefit all consumers.

John Farrell:
I feel like you’ve made the best segue ever to my next question, which is can you explain a little bit more about why you picked the name Common Charge? What are you hoping to convey?

Katherine Hamilton:
Oh, so the name was really important because we did not want to sound wonky. We didn’t want to say we’re a distributed energy resource coalition. And of course we needed some help with that. So we did find a really good communications team that could say, alright, let’s get you all out of your own heads on capacity payments and integrated resource planning and think of something that’s more accessible because that’s what we want it to be. So ‘Common Charge’ indicates collective momentum. So you think about charge being the language of electricity. A charge is a flow, it’s also figurative surge of action as well as the literal flow. And then common is so much about the collective, a shared purpose, a spirit of community. So we wanted something that was democratic, that was inclusive, and it was also inviting people to join. And since we planted that common charge flag, we’ve had a lot of interest of people of all types across the spectrum from every walk of life coming in and saying, how do I be part of this? And that’s exactly what we wanted to do.

John Farrell:
Can you explain a little bit about why it started off as this coalition of both nonprofit advocacy and research organizations and businesses. What advantage does that convey over networks that tend to have just one or the other? I am kind of thinking back on what you said at the beginning about your work in states and the southern part of the country and MISO South or Sierra Club and the businesses that you weren’t necessarily working together. Is that part of it here that you’ve seen personally that, but also how are you thinking writ large that this might convey an advantage?

Katherine Hamilton:
Yeah, I think it would be enormously powerful because if you think about a business group, their job is to create a market for the business. Like let’s increase the market for whatever it is, smart thermostats or energy storage or rooftop solar, whereas a nonprofit will have a mission — to reduce cost or to increase environmental benefits. So there may be a whole host of missions.
And what a group like this will do is connect those dots and make sure that whatever policy is presented. And what happens sometimes is that you have the NGOs promoting a policy that will solve for their mission, say environmental benefits, but it isn’t rooted in what a business can take advantage of. At the same token, a business group might put forward a policy that doesn’t necessarily accomplish everything that the nonprofit wants to accomplish from their mission. So by collecting those, by putting those all together, you then make sure that everybody benefits on both sides, whether it is the business wanting to open a market or whether it is a nonprofit wanting to make sure that you’re solving for missions.

John Farrell:
Yeah. Could you talk a little bit about what some of the common principles are for Common Charge? What are the members signing up for? What are the things that are most held dear in terms of the goals for the advocacy, the goals for the work.

Katherine Hamilton:
So the mission is to put the power literally in people’s hands by creating a reliable energy system that works for everyone everywhere.
So how are we going to do that? The principles are we want open and fair markets. So we want distributed assets to be able to compete on a level playing field with utility investments and the bulk supply system. So we want everybody to be able to have a fair market and competition.
The second would be equitable access, public benefit, and participation. We want grid modernization and distributed asset policies to ensure that they’re very customer-focused to reduce strain on people’s pocketbooks and as well as the grid.
The third piece is proper valuation, compensation and cost transparency. And that’s basically saying people should be paid for the benefits that they provide to the grid. So that’s going to be really important.
Rate payer autonomy and choice, making sure that rate payers are able to invest in and deploy a range of distributed assets to control how they access and use energy.
And then finally the fifth is innovation system transformation and collaboration. So while a lot of these technologies are already accessible or available, even if they haven’t been unlocked, we want to make sure that this mix also leverages all of the innovation on the application side and the technology side as critical tools that you can then put to use for resilience, reliability, affordability, and sustainability.

John Farrell:
Given the principles and this interesting intersection of nonprofits and businesses in common charge, how do you see it fitting into the ecosystem of organizations that are doing energy policy advocacy right now? Do you have a sense of what some of the priorities will be and where it will be doing advocacy? Is it state legislatures? Is it public utilities commissions? Is it congress, FERC? Where is common charge going to show up and how might it fit in?

Katherine Hamilton:
The going-in principle is we don’t want to duplicate what other people are already doing and having success with. We want to amplify what people are doing. We want to enhance what everyone’s doing and where capacity is needed we want to provide that capacity. So that might be in the form of education, or providing resources, whether that’s thought leadership, or white papers, or model policies. We want to amplify and build capacity among all the groups that are out there. So I just did a presentation earlier today to a bunch of groups who are very organized and doing a lot of really good work, and they were thrilled to think that there would be a place they could go to get additional information to be able to get additional capacity where they needed it. So I could see us, right now, we’re looking at what’s happening in all the states, who’s doing what, what are the policies out there that are already either being implemented or being proposed? Are they good or bad based on a set of criteria that of course are pegged to all of these core principles that I listed for you. And then let’s figure out where do we need to put capacity. Where is it that you could just do a little bit to get something over the finish line to get a win? Where is it that is more of a greenfield that we really need to put a lot more muscle into and try to build something?
So I think we’re right now kind of trying to take stock of that, but I imagine that we are more of an enhancer of what others are doing. So we’ll have to see whether we actually get involved in the dockets or whether we’re simply providing the tools for others to do so. But right now we’re focused on states. The federal is just a little different space to be in. We would certainly consider that, I imagine, if it seemed like that was a place where we would need to build capacity. But right now we’re focused on people on the ground in communities.

John Farrell:
That might’ve been the most generous and bland way of describing the state of our federal policy environment, Catherine. But I appreciate the focus on the states. You mentioned that you’ve had people reaching out already after hearing about the launch of Common Charge, interested in learning more, interested in joining. So if I wanted my organization to join Common Charge as ILSR is already done, what would I do?

Katherine Hamilton:
So there are two ways. One is a very direct route to my email inbox, which is [email protected]. There’s also a button on the website that you can click on that says Membership, and you can read about the core principles and fill out a form, and then it’ll eventually go to me too. But at least you can then access all the materials, kind of think about whether this is something you’d really want to sign on to. And it’s interesting that the feedback we’re getting right now has been so positive and across all kinds of groups, chambers of commerce, state governments, independent system operators, all kinds of groups on the ground are reaching out and that’s great. That’s exactly what we wanted. And a lot of them are like, what is this? Because Common Charge isn’t saying anything specific about distributed assets. If you go to the website, you can see that that’s what it’s about, but it also invites people to ask and invites people to come in and inquire and be curious. That’s exactly what we want.
So if you are a group and you’re wondering if you belong in this, don’t limit yourself. Say you work on clean energy or say you don’t work on clean energy, say you work on something totally different, feel free to reach out because you may still benefit from being part of this group.

John Farrell:
I think that’s great, and I love the idea that this is really broad. I think one of the things that I’ve seen in my many years of working in the clean energy space and in advocacy is that there is this sort of balkanized nature to the work on distributed assets or distributed energy resources, or basically like anything the utility is not doing, there might be an advocacy groups that’s like, well, we’re for solar, or we’re for batteries, or, we’re really excited about smart thermostats and deploying those as part of energy efficiency and demand response. So I think one of the reasons that I was really drawn to this effort to stand up this organization is the idea that there’s one organization kind of looking at the collection of all of these, which also really aligns well with the idea of how to change the system, which is, as I think you articulated so well, how do we use all of these things, resources, assets together to accomplish something more than them just being individual parts. So perhaps no better name than Common Charge for that effort.

Katherine Hamilton:
You’re absolutely right, John. I think about everybody’s out there trying to find policies that work for a specific technology, and sometimes they are inadvertently in opposition to each other, and this will prevent that from happening. This will enable us to come up with policy ideas that are really going to help give access to everyone for all of these technologies.

John Farrell:
Well, Katherine, thank you so much for the time that you’ve put into already helping to get Common Charge off the ground. I’m sure it’s been a very exciting effort over quite a long period of time, and I’m really excited to see what happens with Common Charge in the future.

Katherine Hamilton:
I am too. Thanks so much, John.

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John Farrell:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Local Energy Rules with acting executive director Katherine Hamilton about the launch of Common Charge. On the show page, look for a link to commoncharge.org and a summary of this conversation.
Local Energy Rules is produced by myself and Ingrid Behrsin with editing provided by audio engineer Drew Birschbach. Tune back into Local Energy Rules every two weeks to hear how we can take on concentrated power to transform the energy system. Until next time, keep your energy local and thanks for listening.
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