Data Centers and Local Power: New Models for Community Benefits

A public webinar hosted by Common Charge and Advanced Energy United and Common Charge

Over the summer of 2026, the distributed energy industry announced a flurry of deals and pilots showing a smarter way to build grid resilience and meet rising power demands, like those from data centers than building expensive, outdated, and polluting gas plants that leave communities stranded holding the bill. By aggregating solar, batteries, EV charging, and other flexible devices through demand response and virtual power plants, states can tap existing, rapidly deployable resources to meet new demand faster, more cheaply, and with fewer risks and community impacts.

But how can state policy make that happen in practice? And what models are being developed and deployed with the potential to scale? This webinar puts four of those models side by side: how they work, how they differ, and what it would take for more states to unlock them at scale.

What you will learn:

– Four distinct models, compared head-to-head: bring-your-own-capacity, residential aggregation, multi-brand hardware partnerships, and locally-owned community virtual power plants

– What states need to do: capacity accreditation and other regulatory unlocks to let these models scale and allow communities to participate and receive benefits

Panelists

• Sam Silerio, Solar United Neighbors
  Texas Program Director
• Amy Heart, Sunrun
  Senior Vice President of Policy
• Lucie Drummond, Voltus
  Senior Director, Market Policy
• Kristin Eberhard, Rewiring America
  Vice President of Policy

Moderator

• Vero Bourg-Meyer, Common Charge
  Senior Policy Advisor