966: When Solar Works But the Savings Don’t | Charlotte Meerstadt

When Charlotte Meerstadt put solar on her Amsterdam home, the numbers made sense.

Then Charlotte moved to the U.S. and rented out the apartment. The solar panels kept doing exactly what they were supposed to do: producing cheap, clean power. But, while the tenant received the lower utility bill, Charlotte still owned the panels and had no clear way to capture the savings her asset was creating.

That mismatch revealed a bigger problem hiding across rental housing and distributed energy: the person who can invest in clean energy is often not the same person who gets the financial benefit.

Under 1% of rental rooftops have solar.

Now put that next to 49 million rental units in the U.S., including roughly 23 million apartments, and you start to see the size of the opportunity Charlotte Meerstadt stumbled into.

In this episode, Charlotte, Founder and CEO of Fram Energy, joins Nico to explain how she turned that insight into a company helping property owners, developers, and energy asset owners measure, bill, and collect the value their projects produce.

She also shares how early customer conversations shaped the product, why real-world complexity can become a moat, and what she had to unlearn as an engineer to become a founder.

Expect to learn:

🔹 Why solar savings get complicated when owners and tenants try to split the value

🔹 How meter data can become revenue asset owners can collect

🔹 Why billing, tariffs, permissions, and customer trust matter after the system is built

🔹 How customers pulled Fram from rental solar into larger energy transactions