Hi Mark,
Your idea sounds interesting, but as conservation of charge is perhaps considered one of the deepest and most hallowed principles in physics, you face an uphill battle.
I think if an experiment can be performed to directly test your idea, and your idea gives the correct prediction whereas the orthodox view fails to do so, then it is a lot more likely that people will take it seriously.
The recency of the discovery of the Anomalous Coulomb Drag Effect might serve as a useful pointer for you to see if you can find predictions of related anomalies that have not yet been tested or even looked for (you do have an advantage in that your perspective should lead you to look for effects that others are not even considering, you should use it).
I hope that you can come up with proposing such an experiment.
On the theoretical side, if your idea is correct, then conservation of charge and conservation of mass-energy can no longer be considered distinct conservation laws, because then under certain circumstances they could be individually violated. They would have to be part of a more general mass-energy-charge conservation law.
In fact, taking this angle in presenting your idea, that our current conservation laws are not the most general, may be more likely to fall on receptive ears than the current angle, criticizing something that most physicist would not even think to question.
A potential problem I see here is that not every particle that has mass-energy has electrical charge, but this may be overcome since we know of an analog: photons, which do not have mass, also obey conservation of mass-energy.
On a practical side, I know that you are an applied physicist with a background in the Energy industry and that the applications of your idea are dear to you. I just would like to mention the possibility that focusing too much on the application side at this early speculative stage may hurt your chances of being taken seriously.
The reason I think this is because there are companies that are currently exploiting the lack of fundamental physics knowledge of investors to fraudulently obtain money by erroneously claiming that they can solve energy problems by means of applications which exploit purported mistakes in our current conceptualization of fundamental physics. You may have heard of Blacklight Power, for example.
In summary, my recommendation would be to focus more on how to gain constructive new theoretical and experimental (but not so much practical) insights from your idea and less on how current physics is wrong, in order for more people to pay attention to your idea.
I hope you found these suggestions useful.
All the best,
Armin
