Not Too Late: Charlotte Meerstadt

Why are billions of square feet of rooftops on commercial and residential buildings sitting empty while energy prices skyrocket? The answer isn't a lack of technology, but a cash flow problem.

In this episode, we sit down with Charlotte Meerstadt, the founder of Fram Energy, a civil engineer turned entrepreneur who is unlocking a massive missed opportunity in the clean energy space. Charlotte walks us through the split incentive problem: why landlords have historically avoided solar, and how her fintech platform turns empty roofs into revenue-generating assets.

What We Discuss:

• The $5 Trillion Opportunity: How 80 billion square feet of tenant-occupied roof area in the U.S. can be transformed into a win-win for owners and renters.
• The Fintech Layer of Clean Energy: Why the secret to decarbonization isn't just better panels, but smarter billing software.
• Energy Affordability & Data Centers: The real-world impact of rising utility rates and how localized solar can protect vulnerable communities (like seniors on fixed incomes) from price hikes.
• The Founder’s Journey: From baking cakes at 15 in the Netherlands to navigating the pre-seed to seed transition while practicing focused presence as a mother and CEO.
• The Future of Circular Systems: Charlotte’s vision for a world where we take 100% responsibility for the energy we extract and consume.

"The solar went from the smartest thing I could have done to a really silly decision... because of a cashflow problem. That is where software makes the difference."

Whether you’re interested in the future of the grid, the evolution of ESG into bottom-line value, or the grit required to build a climate-tech startup in 2026, this conversation is packed with first-principles thinking and actionable insights.

Transcript

Meet Charlotte

Zeshan Khalid 0:05

Charlotte, thank you so much for doing this with us. Tell me a little bit about yourself, who you are. Let's hear the founder pitch about you.

Early Entrepreneur Roots

Solar Split Incentives

Landlord Value Proposition

Charlotte Meerstadt 0:13

Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. I'm very excited to dig into everything from energy and clean energy billing software together with you today, Zeshan. So I'm from the Netherlands originally. My background is as a civil engineer, and I started my career working at one of the Netherlands national labs on energy infrastructure at that point in time related to transportation. And I have always been super interested in entrepreneurship. My very first company was baking cakes for local cafes when I was 15 years old. I definitely felt like I was making money because I made more per cake than the ingredients. I don't think I was very good at pricing my own time, like biking all over town on my bicycle, bringing the cakes around. But yeah, after starting my career really working on energy infrastructure, I very much liked working on kind of the energy space and the climate space, and that was motivating to me. But it never really felt quite human enough. And that is why I'm so happy with the kind of problem space and product we're working on at FREMERGE. And where the inspiration for the company really came from is my own experience as a very small-time property owner of one rental apartment where I used to live. Being a very energy climate-focused person, I put solar on the roof when I lived there. And the solar did really great in the period that I was living there. We had great net metering rules, energy price rose, so solar was a great investment until I moved to the US to go to business school, and that apartment became a rental apartment. And from that point in time, the tenants started paying the energy bill, which made sense for a number of reasons. Kind of difficult to have like a utility account if you're very far away. And from that point in time, the solar just made no sense at all anymore because my tenants were just getting free electricity. And we tried to solve it in a few hacky ways for a bunch of reasons, including that the tenants had never seen the solar savings, didn't know us yet, they weren't really down for some kind of solution where they just paid us 30 euros a month or something. Long story short, the solar went from the smartest thing I could have done with that rooftop to like a really silly decision. And it just fascinated me from a first principal's perspective, because the panels were still on the roof turning photons into electrons, which means that they were generating electricity. But because of this cash flow problem, it just made no sense as a landlord and it wasn't making me any money. And that just felt like a really great place for a software solution to make a difference and to really make those projects a big win. And then during business school, I kind of took that idea into business school and validated that it wasn't just my one tiny apartment experiencing this problem, but that there's just billions of square feet of roof on all kinds of tenant-occupied buildings, residential, commercial, industrial, that is currently just not put to work for the property owner, not making them any money and adding no value to the tenants. And just built a lot of conviction about building a solution that could solve that problem by turning it into a win-win.

Zeshan Khalid 3:34

You went to school and then you kind of validated this whole idea of solving this problem because tenants want lower bills, and then the property owners want a property which is clean and also like can help the tenants, and then they're building an asset, right? Is that correct?

Charlotte Meerstadt 3:52

Partially, but I'd say the bigger motivation for the property owners is that right now their roof usually is doing nothing for them. It's not generating any value for them, it's not generating any rent or other income. It's just annoying because they have to like replace it and repair leaks, but the roof isn't really doing anything for them. So I'd say beyond creating this tenant energy discount amenity and making their properties more resilient from a future energy perspective, there's also just a really big financial motivation to start turning all of those square feet on the roof into a value add part of their real estate asset that is generating net operating income for them.

Zeshan Khalid 4:36

So, Charlotte, tell me what is the big number looks like in the market. Tell me about like what is the opportunity looks like here. And how do you justify like how where is the data coming from? Can you show us something and talk about it?

Why Billing Is Hard

Charlotte Meerstadt 4:50

Yes, so back in June, I gave a pitch and I mentioned this big number saying that there's a $5 trillion missed value creation opportunity for the real estate industry and the solar industry from not using these multi-tenant building rooftops. So the way that the calculation breaks down is first of all, we're gonna start off just calculating the roof area per sector for commercial, residential, and industrial roofs. So you can see some sources here, and you can see that together our estimation is that there's oh, why did this turn into dollars? Roofs are roof area are square feet and not dollars. So this five trillion dollar calculation is for the US. So we go from calculating that there are about 80 billion square feet of tenant-occupied roof in the US. From there, we go to a whole little row here of solar economic inputs. So we're gonna estimate, which is conservative, that we can fill about 45% of all of these roofs. We're going to assume 3% growth of the rate of electricity. This is very conservative. I did this calculation when a lot of the load growth and rate growth discussions were less crystallized. So if you throw all that together, that is where we get the five trillion dollar numbers.

Zeshan Khalid 6:23

This is a very interesting table that you're showing me. But tell me the business case. Like, how does this work? Telling it to a politician or a businessman or a solar company or a policymaker. How does it like look like? Why nobody has thought about it yet? And if people have thought about it yet, why this space is so empty?

Charlotte Meerstadt 6:44

Yeah, that's really simple as it is, largely because of these split incentives. So there just hasn't been a compelling solution for either the real estate industry or the solar industry to start filling up these rooftops. Because you have the tenants of the building who are definitely consuming electricity, like whether they're resie, then they're consuming a lot of electricity. Some industrial applications consume huge amounts of electricity. Commercial tenants have a very nice consumption profile that matches solar production very nicely because generally commercial buildings are peaking during the daytime in their electricity use. But because each tenant owns their own electricity account, it just doesn't make sense for either the landlord or a solar developer to go invest in solar panels for that roof unless they have a solution that can help you sell those on-site-generated kilowatt hours to the tenants of the building. And that is really the critical part of the solution that we provide. And when you explain this to someone in a bar, it sounds so intuitive and simple, but it is really, really hard. Because right now we're generating thousands of energy bills per month. That means we have to adjust our process to correctly bill. And then there's also the storytelling portion where you need to get really good at explaining to the tenants of the building exactly how much value they're getting and how they're getting it. Because at the end of the day, in this business model, your tenant is the source of revenue. They are the ones paying for the kilowatt hours. And even though they're also getting a great deal, they're getting a discount compared to grid rate.

Zeshan Khalid 8:30

So tell me a story from a tenant's perspective, let's say, or a b somebody who owns a building and they're tent uh they're giving this to the tenants, and then you came in and you solved their problem, like a success story. It's very interesting because uh after data center boom, so much people are complaining about every part in the US about their energy costing. This is the main problem right now, affordability.

Traction And Growth

Charlotte Meerstadt 8:55

Energy affordability is a really huge theme right now, and I keep reading a lot of interesting articles about how people are going to vote more based on energy affordability, and it also has a very real impact on people's lives. I was together with Eliza on our team in October, we were visiting one of our properties, and when you speak to residents, so this is this happens to be a senior community, and essentially there a lot of these seniors are on all kinds of benefits programs, and especially in an expensive state like California, which also has a really high cost of electricity, their lives are essentially everything can like if you budget well, you can just about pay everything, but there isn't a lot of slack. And this is in Southern California Edison territory, and right when we were there, Southern California Edison kind of sent out a notification that from October 1st they were raising their rates by I think was it 10% or 11%, something around that mark. So if you have a life where all of your kind of expenses with with like a combination of support systems, because you're a senior and you're not not really able to make a lot of extra money, where everything like right about fits, a 10% increase of your energy bill is just gonna be have a really huge impact. And that kind of goes into your first part of the question, just telling a bit of a real story from the tenant perspective. So one person who lives in that community, one of the residents, he came to see us a bunch. He was very excited about the solar. And then he was telling us that since the solar arrived on the roof, besides seeing his savings on the bill very clearly every month, the solar, because he doesn't use a lot, the solar was actually producing so much for him that he was getting a check from Southern California Edison for $300 at the end of the year. So besides getting these monthly savings, because of the extra solar production, just because of his usage pattern, he had $300 extra dollars to spend, literally like cash money every year. So I think for him it's a super impactful program. He pays his solar bill to us every month, and that money directly goes to the property owner, and that is net operating income that they're making off their roof.

Zeshan Khalid 11:20

So tell me a little bit more. Where are you guys working in? How many customers you have right now, how much numbers you guys are doing.

Charlotte Meerstadt 11:29

We're gonna do a fun kind of play on Spotify reps and post that on our LinkedIn in the coming weeks. So I wish we already had all those numbers because it would be really fun to kind of walk you through all those milestones for this year. But we're currently billing over 3,000 households every month, which is a really great achievement just for the pre-seed round at Frem Energy, and then we're gonna raise a seed round starting next year. So we've grown super rapidly, learned a lot about how to provide reliable support and completely accurate bills that go out on time for all those residents every month. Super proud to have 100% on-time performance. And we're serving just under 10 megawatts of solar right now and have a lot of exciting expansion on the on the planning for next year. A lot of the properties also come with energy storage. So that's also great. I think the future of the whole clean energy sector is about flexibility as well.

Zeshan Khalid 12:31

So, right now, can you tell me which markets are you working in and where are you seeing? So let's say as data centers come in, like in different markets in the US right now. What markets do you see in the future are going to be affected the most? And what can you help in with?

Charlotte Meerstadt 12:50

I'll start with the first part of your question, just the markets where we're currently operating and we're seeing a lot of growth. So California is our biggest market, and it has the most mature, specifically like multifamily solar market. There's a lot of great installers who have their own pipeline of property owners that they're selling to. So we love working with those channel partners in California. We have sold projects in other places. We have New York, Pennsylvania, and we're very excited with the team to onboard our first Hawaii projects next year. We have really high conviction that the Northeast, which has both high electricity rates, generally favorable solar policies with some extra incentives at the state level, and a lot of aggressive decarbonization plans. So and building reporting standards. Like there's a lot of reasons that the Northeast is great. So that's the first part of your question. In terms of who's being hit with this might sound like a bit of a cop-out, but it's it's almost every state at this point in time, because all of the states want a lot of the data center business. So a lot of the states are actually kind of competing and putting in bids to attract that business to their states. By doing that, they are also inviting that often slightly problematic load burden for their aging grids.

Zeshan Khalid 14:17

I have I've been reading a lot about data centers and how they're, you know, electricity usage and everything. So there's a big narrative. I'm just talking about the human narrative in those communities, right? You're seeing all the media reporting that, oh, they're getting politicians are actually running on this because the voters are not worrying because they're like, we don't want data centers because our energy prices are going up, right? Why these data centers and utility has so much problems to deal with, like they are stuck in their own world, they they don't have any innovation going on at their part. But why can't these data centers pay to the residents if they want to build something and then maybe cut down a lot of their building? Let's say I'm paying $50 or $100 for my bill. And if someone wants a data center in my city, why that data center is not paying me because they're installing a big hike of electricity.

Founder Life Balance

Charlotte Meerstadt 15:18

Yeah, I think the price of electricity is one of the reasons people aren't always thrilled about data centers nearby. I think there's some uh health and sound implications as well. And you're turning parcels of land into honestly, slightly dead, you know, there's a lot of fences, they're very secretive and protective. So it's not exactly a neighborhood community boost always. At the same time, everyone keeps asking ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude questions and for help with coding and with school. So there's definitely a reason that it's so compelling to pursue that growth now. There's this huge push and squish on like we need more compute capacity, we need more data centers. If you look at how radically more efficient AI has gotten over the last couple of years, there's some people who kind of plot that out and are like, uh, maybe in a couple of years we won't have this continued, sustained need for extra data centers. At the same time, I think Sam Altman said maybe a month ago or so that he thinks a large part of the planet is gonna be covered in data centers in a couple decades. So there's very different perspectives on where this is gonna go. I think the idea that the data center would actively contribute to lowering the community's energy bills is fundament fundamentally a really good one. I think the positive thing is that we're definitely seeing quite some renewables, and I think there's all kinds of interesting projects of like timing the energy pool of the data center to burden the grid less. And I think communities have a great position to negotiate things like that when the data center like really wants to go take their land essentially. And the one thing to watch out for is that we're also seeing a lot of like gas and a lot of retired coal plants being considered like, ooh, let's build a data center next to this retired coal plant so we can fire that one back up. So, also from a community health perspective, if I were those communities, I would really be pushing for flexible forms of clean energy to not place those both health and carbon burdens on the community.

Zeshan Khalid 17:46

We spoke a lot about the business model and everything. Let's talk about your personal founder journey. Tell me about like your personal thing. Like, how do you navigate the whole journey and how do you like manage the work life and founder life and home life? What is going on? Like, how do you do this whole challenge?

Charlotte Meerstadt 18:06

So, many, many thoughts on that. I'd say I am so happy every day that I chose this path of this journey of building a company. And I don't think everyone would love it, but the reasons I love it are that I always have to have my brain in like eight different domains that are all connected. So on any given day, there will be hiring, helping solve challenges on the engineering side, talking to one of our customers about an existing project, doing three sales calls, and all of them are super related. And I love kind of using what I got from the engineering conversation in the sales call that gives me an idea that helps for the existing project. So I love being in all those different brain buckets, and from a growth perspective, it is just unparalleled. Every week I have to do things I've never done before, and sometimes kind of things that we need to improve and change at the company are also reflections of things that I kind of need to grow and improve, or like flows. I've also just learned so much and loved that trust building, and it's something really special that people give you that trust as well. And to the question of combining having a young kid and the company, for me it's really an exercise in really focused presence. So every single morning I have over an hour of just completely focused present time with my kid. Then either my husband or I generally take him to daycare. And after that, I just really disappear into work. And I'll like kind of smile if I think of him or see a picture, but my brain will be very in work. And then in the evening, I'll be around usually between 6, 6.15, and when he goes to bed at 7.30. And then after that, I'll do some work and catch up again. And I just am completely off my phone and work laptop during that time with him. And I think it actually helps for work. Often at 6 p.m., I'm kind of all like fired up and in the chaos of the day, and it feels like a lot of things have to happen now and are this big. And then when I open my laptop after having been completely out brain-wise, I've always feel like there's so much clarity and some things that felt really difficult or like a high lift. I just get done in like five or ten minutes. So it's working for now and it's going good. And it's just people think it's very chaotic or crazy. It's more extremely regimented, disciplined, and structured.

Zeshan Khalid 20:51

Let's say you're out of some depth and you don't know the answer of the question, or you don't know what's sometimes you're frustrated. How how do you deal with that?

Charlotte Meerstadt 21:01

So I kind of love not knowing things. I find it really liberating to go try a new skill from nothing. And my first step is always to speak to ideally like three to six people who are experts in that. So maybe about two months ago, one of our customers was super close to signing a big contract, and they were like, okay, the one area where we need conviction is that you guys, your tiny company can handle the customer support volume, and you'll be mature enough from a customer support perspective to like handle all this business. And what I did is I threw kind of our investors, Stanford Network, asking in a few Slack groups with other founders, I found I think five just extremely industry leading, very experienced customer service leaders. And they were all super kind. Offered to have a conversation with me within two days. Spoke for half an hour with all of them. But you you said that you noticed I seem pretty calm, and I truly am pretty calm on most days. I think I'm quite resilient, but it also just comes from a lot of acceptance that everything is temporary. There's weeks that I'm like, this is a unicorn, this is the best company ever. And I know, oh, probably in two weeks I won't feel like this. And then there's weeks that I'm like, why did I drag all these people? Like, what if this thing never works? And I also know then, like, oh, I'm not gonna be feeling like this in a couple days. And I don't have weeks like that very often. And whenever I do, I'm like, oh, this is just, you know, all of these feelings are very temporary. And I also have a nice mantra. Whenever I bike through Brooklyn to work, I always say to myself, at the end of the day, the company is gonna be further than it is right now. And just making things small like that, I think, also really helps to not make everything too existential and stressful.

Zeshan Khalid 23:04

So tell me about like what do you see in the climate space? Because a lot of people you work in the climate space, clearly. You're trying to cut down electricity costs for people and then giving benefit to everybody and also trying to make things cleaner. But how do you how do you see the whole narrative going around the space? Are you a pessimistic? Are you optimistic? And why?

Magic Wand Future

Charlotte Meerstadt 23:30

Definitely a very interesting time for energy. So there was a very doom and gloom period that I did not really participate in, where just around the big beautiful bill this year in July, the whole solar industry was kind of crying like, this is gonna be terrible, it's gonna kill us. And I think at the same time, we were just discussing earlier in this conversation all of the data center growth, the aging grid, all of the factors pushing up the price of electricity. So energy affordability is very important, and it is bad for households if the price of electricity goes up. For clean energy business models, it is objectively a huge boost when the price of electricity goes up, because the value of the commodity that you're producing with your energy assets is going up. I'm definitely not pessimistic, and I also think a little bit of discipline on the narrative is good. So I think we're swinging very far in the direction of stay away from ESG, stay away from like good vibes, that type of messaging. And we're going very much towards it's all about the bottom line, it's about the value you're creating, and that isn't all positive, but I think in the long term, it's going to make the climate and energy movement more powerful. Because in the era that it was very much about ESG and let's do it for the sake of it, and I can't tell you why you have to reduce emissions, but you should. I just don't think that that was going to completely bring us to solving the climate crisis. And I think the market being pushed to really communicate in terms of the value they're creating is really powerful. And I think we're seeing a lot of focus on just the value of a kilowatt hour, like the value of power, the value of flexibility. Also from a strategic point of view, like for businesses, having access to resilient energy, for example, through energy storage, is becoming compelling for a lot of strategic, security-related reasons. And I also think for the competitiveness with other parts of the world, of course, in the US, China's always top of mind. They have done a phenomenal job at becoming very independent from an energy point of view and generating huge amounts of clean electricity. Basically, all of their new cars that are sold are EVs. I think there's maybe a bit of a healthy, you know, I think it's overcorrecting a little bit, but it'll swing back slightly at some point in time. I don't think it's bad for the climate movement that there is this discipline and focus on adding all kinds of value instead of doing things because they sound good or feel good or for the sake of it.

Zeshan Khalid 26:27

So my last question to you, let's say if you have a magical, okay? What do you change and why?

Charlotte Meerstadt 26:35

I think what I would invent with my magic wand would be that every system is required to be like over 95% circular. And what I mean with that is that if you harvest or introduce anything into the system, you have to be able to get the value of it back at the end. And from a very wide system personal perspective, I think this relates to the way that we consume food and consume clothing and consume a lot of other things that I think would be very beneficial for the world if there were systems in place that pushed people whenever they introduce something to take full responsibility for the end of life. And the way I think it would play really nicely into what we're doing with RAM energy is that there would be this even more heightened focus on that there isn't kind of an easy out for energy, and that we see it as what it is, which is actually a very valuable and precious commodity, and that that's really gonna push everyone. That's gonna make it economically favorable for consumers, businesses, utilities to really embrace all kinds of flexible on-site generation. So this could be solar, wind, coupled with energy storage, or it would also really help nuclear, where you just need to take responsibility. And at the end of the day, that is what's gonna make FREM Energy a big company, is we're just gonna be, as you said, that fintech software layer that is gonna help anyone sell power to any other person or business. So whether it's a property owner selling power to their tenants, or whether it is a clean energy developer selling power to Amazon for a data center, we are going to be the fintech layer that counts the kilowatt hours, applies the relevant tariff, and collects that revenue for whoever owns the asset. So I think that that would be a super interesting and really beneficial version of the world where there's just complete responsibility for everything that you're extracting from the system, and I think it would really help the business as well.

Zeshan Khalid 29:01

Thank you so much.