The energy industry's shared infrastructure record.

Utility territories are buried in PDFs. Rate structures are scattered across regulatory filings. Grid operator boundaries shift without notice. Service territory maps live in state PUC filing systems that require case-by-case requests. Nobody agrees on primary identifiers.

Anyone building software, research, or policy analysis that touches energy infrastructure eventually confronts the same fragmented landscape. The data exists — it’s just never been assembled, normalized, and kept current in one place anyone can use.

CommonGrid is structured around entities and their relationships — not flat datasets. A utility links to its service territory. A territory links to its grid operator. A program links to the utilities offering it. A rate links to the territory it applies in. Every entity is a node in the same connected graph.

That structure means you can start anywhere — a zip code, a co-op name, an ISO — and navigate outward to everything related. No manual joins. No spreadsheet archaeology.

CommonGrid was created by Texture, an energy software company. In building our platform, we spent years normalizing data from EIA, FERC, HIFLD, NOAA, state PUC filings, and hundreds of other sources. The result was a structured, relational model of the U.S. energy landscape.

We decided to open it. Not because we had to — the underlying sources are public — but because the normalization work is genuinely unglamorous, and doing it once for the whole industry makes more sense than having every team do it independently.

Texture’s competitive advantages live in what happens when this context combines with real operational data: device telemetry, customer accounts, control systems. That layer stays proprietary. The registry layer — what every energy software team needs to function — is the commons.

CommonGrid uses an open contribution model: anyone can view and download the data, account-based editing, transparent version history, and community governance. Anyone can propose a change. Every change is attributable, reviewable, and reversible.

Energy data errors can be costly and hard to detect. A wrong territory boundary, an outdated rate schedule, a misclassified ISO assignment — these aren’t typos. So CommonGrid uses a changeset model: edits are proposed as versioned diffs, reviewed by moderators or trusted editors, and merged into the canonical dataset only when approved.

CommonGrid is seeded from government and regulatory sources, then maintained by community contributions. Every field traces back to a citable origin.

CommonGrid is published under the Open Database License (ODbL). You can freely use, modify, and redistribute the data. If you publicly distribute a derivative database, you must attribute CommonGrid and share it under the same terms. This protects the commons from being absorbed into closed products.