Texture open-sources CommonGrid, a public U.S. power-grid registry

25 Sep 2026 (ET): Texture, the grid operating platform bringing AI to energy teams, released CommonGrid — a free, editable, Open Database License registry that connects U.S. utilities, grid operators, power plants, transmission lines, substations, rates, pricing nodes, EV charging stations, and demand-response programs into one public data model with an interactive map and API.

SOFTWARE desk — new AI data centers and other electric loads are asking for power on the same wires homes and factories already use, and the public record of who runs which utility, plant, and line is still split across PDFs, buried co-op pages, and regulatory filings. CommonGrid is Texture’s free map of that record, open so someone closer to a co-op or a town can correct a row and leave a history of the change. The company’s own blog says the registry is not finished, and that some records are wrong.

What the pages say the product is. Texture, called the grid operating platform bringing AI to energy teams, today announced CommonGrid, an open model of U.S. energy infrastructure that anyone can use, cite, and correct. The blog’s deck says CommonGrid turns scattered public information about utilities, programs, markets, and infrastructure into one open, connected, community-maintained registry and interactive map. The wire’s subhead says it connects every U.S. electric utility, grid operator, power plant, program, and major asset into one registry and interactive map, open to the community to contribute what is missing, with every revision reviewed for accuracy, created by Texture and maintained by the community. Every, on that subhead, is the wire’s word. It is not a count this desk made. The live map the company names is commongrid.info. This desk loaded that address and got a page titled CommonGrid. Its description says: explore the open, connected registry of the U.S. power grid: utilities, power plants, transmission lines, EV charging, and more. This desk did not click through every layer of the map.

The question the blog says started the work. Cyril, Texture’s Director of Market Development, wanted to know which demand-response programs were available to electric co-ops. A demand-response program pays a customer to use less electricity, or to use it at a different hour, when the grid is tight. A co-op, here, is a customer-owned electric utility. Those glosses are this desk’s. The blog’s questions were which utilities had programs, which devices could join — thermostats, electric-vehicle chargers, batteries, or something else — and what the terms were. The answers were public. One co-op put the program on a page buried three levels into its site. Another put the details in a PDF. Another had a program that appeared in a regulatory filing and nowhere else. The blog’s line is that each piece was available if you already knew where to look, and that no one had assembled the pieces. Today, the post says, Texture is opening that work to everyone. Those scenes are the company’s. This desk did not open those co-op pages.

Why the blog says public data was still hard to use. The federal government publishes data about utilities and power plants. Grid operators publish market information. State commissions hold utility filings. Public maps contain transmission lines and service territories. Charging networks and federal databases list electric-vehicle stations. An electric vehicle, or EV, is a car that charges from the grid. A service territory is the area a utility is responsible for. Those glosses are this desk’s. The post says finding a fact is only the beginning. Before you can use it, you download the file, learn somebody else’s schema, clean the fields, reconcile the identifiers, remove duplicates, connect it to other sources, and decide which source wins when they disagree. A schema, here, is the list of fields and the names they use. An identifier is the code that is supposed to mean the same utility or plant in two files. Those glosses are this desk’s. Then you do it again when the sources change. The post says researchers, utilities, startups, and government agencies are all paying that tax. The missing piece, on this page, is a single model everyone can use and anyone can keep up to date.

What the blog says already existed, and what it still had to connect. The post names Map Your Grid, OpenGridWorks, and the gridstatus library as worthwhile efforts to open pieces of the grid. It says each is an elegant solution to a real information problem, and that none solved the fragmentation Texture was running into. Texture still had to reconcile schemas and build the connections. Those three names are the blog’s list. This desk did not review those projects. CommonGrid, the post says, is meant to be the place where those pieces come together: a shared registry with a connected data model, open APIs, source-level provenance, contribution history, and moderation. An API, an application programming interface, is a way for another program to ask the registry a question and get a structured answer. Provenance, here, is the record of where a fact came from. Those glosses are this desk’s. The goal on the page is not another slice of the grid. It is a foundation where many slices become one picture that keeps getting corrected.

What the blog says it mapped, and how the rows connect. Texture mapped utilities and their service territories, grid operators, power plants, transmission lines, substations, rates, wholesale pricing nodes, and public EV charging stations. It says it input customer counts, sales, and capacity. The page does not print those counts. Do not invent them. A substation is the yard where voltage changes between the long-distance lines and the local wires. A pricing node is a point in a wholesale market where a price is set. Wholesale, here, is the power market between generators and the utilities that buy for customers, not the bill on a kitchen table. Those glosses are this desk’s. The post’s example of the link: a demand-response program belongs to a utility, that utility serves a territory, and that territory sits within a balancing authority or a market. A balancing authority is the body that keeps electricity supply and demand matched in a region. That gloss is this desk’s. Power plants, transmission lines, rates, and charging stations sit in the same landscape. The model is those relationships, the post says, rather than a folder of unrelated spreadsheets. You can start with a utility, a ZIP code, a power plant, or a point on the map and move outward.

The wire’s inventory, kept apart from the blog’s, and the blog’s own limit on completeness. The wire says CommonGrid’s database includes every U.S. electric utility, territory, ISO, market node, and major grid asset. An ISO, an independent system operator, coordinates the high-voltage grid in a region. The wire’s list also names RTOs, regional transmission organizations, which do that coordinating job under another name. Those glosses are this desk’s. The bullets: every U.S. investor-owned utility, co-op, municipal utility, and federal power agency; grid operators, meaning ISOs, RTOs, and balancing authorities; power plants that are solar, wind, nuclear, gas, and hydro assets over 1 megawatt; transmission lines from 69 kilovolts to 765 kilovolts, queryable on a map and attributed to owners; every public AC and DC charging station in the U.S., with network and plug-standard details; wholesale pricing nodes across seven ISOs and RTOs; substations normalized from OpenStreetMap and filtered to 69 kilovolts and above; programs and rates, meaning demand response, rebates, and tariff structures, queryable by territory. A megawatt is a million watts, a unit of how much power a plant can produce. A kilovolt is a thousand volts, a measure of how hard the electricity is being pushed down a line. AC is alternating current and DC is direct current, the two ways a public charger delivers power. A plug standard is the connector shape. A tariff is the published price schedule. Those glosses are this desk’s. Over 1 megawatt, 69 to 765 kilovolts, seven markets, and every are the wire’s. The blog does not print those cutoffs. The blog also says CommonGrid is not complete, and that some of the records are wrong. Do not file the wire’s every as a finished census. The wire itself asks for help on municipal utility boundaries. It says investor-owned and cooperative territories are already in good shape, and that municipal boundaries are thinner and need local knowledge. That sentence is the wire’s. This desk did not survey a town line.

How edits work, and which page says which rule. The blog says CommonGrid is built for correction rather than completeness, on Wikipedia’s moderation and editing model. Anyone can propose a change. Each change keeps its version history. The post says accuracy comes from the people who know their piece of the grid better than Texture does. Every accepted edit keeps its author, source, timestamp, and permanent diff, and each record can be inspected. A diff, here, is the line-by-line record of what changed. That gloss is this desk’s. If a territory or a program’s eligibility rules change, you should be able to see what changed, who changed it, and what evidence supported it. If an edit is wrong, it can be reversed without erasing the record of how it happened. The FAQ on the same page says anyone can create an account, propose an edit, and cite a source. A team of moderators reviews each proposal before it becomes part of the canonical record. The wire’s wording is built and moderated like Wikipedia, with every change attributed to a contributor, cited to a source, timestamped, and reversible. It says anyone can suggest an edit, and that changes are reviewed by an elected moderation team before they merge into an hourly snapshot. It says most edits are reviewed and live in hours. Elected, hourly snapshot, and live in hours are the wire’s. The blog FAQ this desk read says a team of moderators. It does not print elected, and it does not print the hour. Do not collapse those two review clocks. A researcher, the wire says, can cite a specific revision, and an auditor can see who changed what, and when. This desk did not submit an edit.

Who is supposed to keep it, and whose money built it. The blog says that over time the people closest to the data should maintain it. When a co-op launches a demand-response program, someone at that co-op should be able to add it. Researchers should be able to contribute corrections. People who work a region or a class of equipment should be able to help moderate. Texture seeded CommonGrid and funds the infrastructure. The goal is a registry maintained by the community that uses it. The wire says Texture funds the infrastructure and the project is designed to govern itself. Seeded, and funds, are the company’s. This desk did not see a budget.

The license, in the blog’s words and in the wire’s. The normalized data is released under the Open Database License, the same license OpenStreetMap uses. The wire names it the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0. The blog says you can read it, download it, build commercial products with it, modify it, and redistribute it. Attribute the source, and share public derivative databases under the same terms so improvements stay in the commons. A derivative database, here, is a new database you publish that is built from this one. That gloss is this desk’s. The wire’s obligation sentence is shorter: attribution, and sharing improvements back to the project. It says the data can be used commercially, redistributed, and built into products. Share-alike for a public derivative database is the blog’s sentence. Sharing improvements back is the wire’s. Do not treat them as two licenses. This desk did not hire a lawyer to restate the license.

How a reader is told to use it, and whose rate limits those are. The blog says you can explore it visually at commongrid.info, query it through the API, or download the data. The REST API covers utilities, territories, grid operators, programs, rates, power plants, transmission lines, substations, EV charging stations, and pricing nodes. REST, here, means a web address you can call for one kind of record. That gloss is this desk’s. Geographic endpoints can answer which utility serves a coordinate. Vector tiles let another map draw CommonGrid layers. A vector tile is a small piece of the map, already drawn as shapes, that another map can request. That gloss is this desk’s. Every edit is available through the changelog. Weekly database and GeoJSON snapshots are for bulk analysis. GeoJSON is a file of map shapes. That gloss is this desk’s. You can make 60 API requests an hour without creating an account. A free API key raises that to 5,000 requests an hour, and you can create separate keys for different projects. Sixty an hour is one request a minute. Five thousand an hour is the free key’s ceiling, not a promise this desk measured by calling the API. The blog says registration is not a gate on the data. It is traceability for operating the service, and a way to know who is using it. The wire’s numbers match: 60 requests an hour without a key, 5,000 with a free one. The wire adds that weekly snapshots come in SQL or GeoJSON from the CommonGrid GitHub repository. SQL, here, means a database file you can query. That gloss is this desk’s. The wire names GitHub. It does not print the repository address on the page this desk read. Do not invent the URL. The blog says the API documentation is on the CommonGrid developer page. It does not print that page’s address in the sentence this desk read. This desk did not create a key.

Texture uses the same public API, which is the company’s discipline claim, not a demo this desk ran. The blog says Texture could have copied the cleaned data into a private system and kept it. It says that would have left everyone else repeating the work. Instead, when Texture displays public transmission infrastructure, power plants, or other CommonGrid data inside its own platform, it calls the same API it is giving everyone else. The post’s point is that the public registry cannot be an abandoned export, because Texture is building on it too. The FAQ on the same page says yes, CommonGrid connects to Texture’s grid operating system: utility territories, transmission infrastructure, and power plants feed the platform, so co-ops and utilities get that public context next to their private operational data. Same API is the essay’s sentence. Feeds directly, and next to private operational data, is the FAQ’s. This desk did not log into Texture.

The frame the wire puts around the release, and the two quotes. The wire says the release comes as the U.S. grid undergoes the fastest, most consequential change in its history, with a surge in demand from AI and electrification, a wave of new distributed and intermittent generation, and aging infrastructure colliding at once. Distributed generation is power made in many small places, not only at a few large plants. Intermittent means it comes and goes, as wind and solar do. Electrification, here, means machines that used to burn fuel now plug in, including cars and heat. Those glosses are this desk’s. Fastest and most consequential are the wire’s. They are not a ranking this desk made. The wire says that until CommonGrid, a complete view of the system had not been aggregated and mapped, and that the pieces lived across hundreds of separately maintained public sources. Complete, and hundreds, are that sentence’s. The blog’s not-complete sentence still stands beside them. Victor Quinn, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, said no single company can keep an accurate model of the U.S. grid on its own, because utilities launch programs, rates change, assets get retired, and the people who know first do not work at Texture. He said they borrowed Wikipedia’s model: anyone can propose a change, and every change carries its source and its history. Sanjiv Sanghavi, Co-founder and CEO, said every co-op and utility they work with has rebuilt some version of the same map — who serves where, and what programs exist — and each copy ends with a slightly different answer. He said CommonGrid makes that a shared public record instead of a hundred private ones, and that it gets more accurate when someone who knows their own system corrects it. A hundred is his phrase. It is not a census. Those are their sentences on the wire. This desk did not interview them.

Who the about box says Texture is. The wire’s about box says Texture is a grid software platform bringing AI to energy teams, built for decisions utility operators make under pressure. It connects to any meter, device, or data source and provides real-time monitoring, outage detection, transformer load tracking, and coordination of distributed energy resources. A meter is the device that measures use. Outage detection is noticing that power is out. A transformer is the equipment that steps voltage down toward a neighborhood, and tracking its load means watching how hard it is working. A distributed energy resource is a small generator or battery spread across the grid, such as rooftop solar. Those glosses are this desk’s. The about box says co-ops, municipal utilities, and energy companies use Texture to prevent hardware failures, manage rising load, and coordinate those resources without enterprise budgets or multi-year implementations. That is the company’s description of Texture, the product. It is not a feature list for CommonGrid, and it is not a result this desk measured. Headquarters: New York City. Learn more at texturehq.com. The media-contact line on the wire prints Media@twentytwo&brand and the phone 202-798-1986. This desk did not call it.

What the card shows. The card is Texture’s CommonGrid release graphic from the company blog. A laptop sits on the right. Its screen is the U.S. map from the product, regions and lines in color. On the left, the CommonGrid name sits beside a square of dots, and the Texture name sits beside a line mark. Those names are the graphic’s. The request limits, the kilovolt ranges, the megawatt cutoff, and 09:00 ET are not printed as captions on this card. The card has no desk date laid over it. The wire’s schema images are a release image and a Texture logo on prnewswire.com. This filing does not use the logo as the card. The map at commongrid.info also publishes a social card. This filing does not use that social card. The catalog chip is SOFTWARE.

Plain English for the rest of the card. Texture builds software for electric utilities. On 25 Sep 2026 it opened a free public registry called CommonGrid. The registry links utilities, the areas they serve, grid operators, power plants, transmission lines, substations, rates, wholesale prices, public car chargers, and programs that pay people to use less power. You can look at the map, ask the API, or download a weekly snapshot. Without an account the API allows 60 requests an hour. A free key raises that to 5,000. The data uses the Open Database License: commercial use is allowed if you credit it, and a public database you build from it has to stay under the same license. Edits work like a wiki. You propose a change, a moderator reviews it, and the history keeps the author, the source, and the time. The blog says Texture already calls this same API when its own product draws public lines and plants. The blog also says the registry is not finished and some rows are wrong. The wire’s list is more specific, including plants over 1 megawatt and lines from 69 to 765 kilovolts, and it asks for help on city-owned utility borders. 9:00 a.m. Eastern is the wire’s clock. The card is the laptop with the map.

PRIMARY here: Texture’s 25 Sep 2026 blog post by Victor Quinn, schema datePublished 2026-09-25T00:00:00.000-07:00, plus PR Newswire release 302889532, stamped Sep 25, 2026, 09:00 ET — Tier A PRIMARY, the company’s own pages. STATUS PRIMARY. The desk label on the chip is CONFIRMED because that is the catalog word for a primary page we can stand on. The open registry, the connected model, the Wikipedia-style edits, the author-source-timestamp history, the reversible diff, the Open Database License, commercial use with attribution, the map at commongrid.info, the REST API, 60 requests an hour without an account, 5,000 an hour with a free key, weekly snapshots, Texture calling the same public API for transmission lines and power plants, and the framing about AI and electrification against fragmented public filings are those pages’. The wire’s extra inventory — every utility, the megawatt and kilovolt cutoffs, seven ISO and RTO markets, OpenStreetMap substations, the elected moderation team, the hourly snapshot, edits live in hours, municipal boundaries, and the GitHub snapshots — is the wire’s. The blog’s not-complete sentence, and the line that some records are wrong, is the blog’s. NOT claimed: that this desk counted utilities, plants, lines, or chargers, that every was audited, that the registry is finished, that municipal borders are done, that an election of moderators was observed, that 60 and 5,000 were measured by calling the API, a GitHub URL the wire did not print, a login, a stock tip, or investment advice. The card is the release graphic. Distinct from the already-filed nscale-pre-ipo-336b, docker-cloud-sandboxes, kontext-agent-runtime, and dataiku-agent-management.