SPAN Edge shifts buyer to utilities
SPAN
This turns SPAN from a premium home hardware sale into a grid cost reduction product for utilities. Instead of asking a homeowner to pay thousands for a panel replacement, SPAN Edge lets a utility buy a lower cost device that caps whole home load at the service point, so electrification can move forward without rebuilding the customer connection or local transformer in many cases.
-
PG&E is treating this as an infrastructure alternative, not a gadget. Its PanelBoost program targets homes that would otherwise need service upgrades, with stated deployment costs of about $500 to $2,000 per home versus far higher costs for conventional upgrades, and PG&E says more than 600,000 homes in its territory may face this issue over the next decade.
-
The Landis+Gyr partnership gives SPAN a utility sales channel and a place inside existing grid software. Landis+Gyr ties SPAN Edge into Revelo metering and DERMS software, so utilities can see household load, set limits, and coordinate EVs, batteries, solar, and other flexible devices from the same operating system they use for grid programs.
-
That makes SPAN more useful than appliance by appliance demand response. A thermostat program can only trim one load. SPAN sits at the home electrical entry point and can enforce a total capacity ceiling across circuits, which is closer to a controllable substitute for a physical service upgrade and more valuable for transformer congestion management.
If utilities keep approving software controlled service capacity as a reliable substitute for construction, SPAN’s growth path will look more like a grid equipment vendor than a consumer device company. The next step is broader utility procurement, where each deployment also expands a controllable residential load network for demand response, VPPs, and distribution planning.