DTECH 2024: SPAN is Ready to Charge Up the Home Electrification Journey

A recent $96 million investment in electric-panel startup SPAN marks a significant leap towards revolutionizing home electrification, propelling new versatile solutions for modern energy needs. By integrating EV chargers and partnering with appliance giant Kenmore, SPAN aims to simplify the transition to electric homes, targeting the electrification of 1 million homes over the next decade. This ambitious endeavor is supported by the Inflation Reduction Act, promising substantial incentives for homeowners to adopt renewable energy solutions.

At DISTRIBUTECH 2024, MarketScale spoke with Curtis Bonn, SPAN’s Utility Partnerships and Business Development Lead. Bonn shared insights on SPAN’s innovative smart panels and their role in facilitating a seamless electrification journey for homeowners, highlighting the company’s efforts in providing comprehensive energy management solutions and contributing to a sustainable future.

Curtis’ Thoughts

“It’s great to be here at DISTRIBUTECH 2024. It’s really a big week for us. We launched our SPAN panel about four years ago, and the long story short is that we help homes electrify. We allow those homes to add EVs, induction stoves, elective water heaters, and so on and so forth to really begin their electrification journey without having to have the utility upgrade their service.

We provide additional value to the homeowner through the adoption of time-of-use rates, demand response programs, and really three hundred and sixty-degree whole-home visibility. I mentioned it’s a big week for us because we’ve had that panel in the market for a few years now. But what you can see off to your left is that we are now introducing three or four additional panels. We’ve got our SPAN panel forty-eight, SPAN panel twenty-four, SPAN panel sixteen, and then SPAN meter eight.

If you think about how many homeowners are really thinking about electrifying their homes, I would say we’re just at the beginning of a longer journey. And so, as time grows and, different federal funding opportunities come up either through the IRA or through utility rebate programs for electrified appliances and different technologies like smart panels, like span. I think we’re going see that grow and grow over time.

So, what we have here is the demo span home app. Anybody can download our demo app, either on the Google or Apple store. And it gives a really great understanding of what it means to be a span homeowner.

This is our flow screen. And what we show the homeowner is how SPAN and how their home is being powered. In this case, by solar here at the house, and also through the grid and through the battery when those power sources are active.

What’s really cool about SPAN is that we give real-time insights down to the circuit level of what’s happening in the home. Then, we can click on any of these different circuits and get trends by the day or by the week. This is really fantastic energy information that customers today can use to save energy or figure out a better way to optimize their energy use.

SPAN also has AI running in the background, understanding how appliances run so that, ultimately, we can give alerts to customers when we sense different appliances aren’t running like they should. So, giving more energy intelligence and actionable energy insights to the homeowner. We go as far as actually showing where the energy breakdown is happening across the home, and we help understand or help the homeowner understand where the grid itself got its energy, showcasing where, you know, nuclear and hydro are powering the grid in their area—some really great energy insights.

The homeowner gets more and more familiar with how energy is being produced and consumed. Yeah. Customer education is a challenge, really for everyone across the energy industry and ecosystem, including utilities, including technology providers like span. Certainly, it starts with what we believe is a world-class customer experience. Almost creating layman-level types of understanding of how energy is being used in the home and then giving very simple, actionable insights for the home are just some ways that we’re doing and trying to achieve that customer education.

Ultimately, it’s going to take everybody. This is going to be an all-hands-on-deck type approach between utility between commissions, state regulators, federal regulators, different community organizations, and technology providers like ourselves to make sure customers understand how energy is being consumed and how not only they can save energy for their home, but again, how they can play a role in helping the grid be stable, be more reliable and ultimately help to make the energy at, you know, world a little bit better place from a decarbonization perspective.

It’s going to take a journey, but we’re glad to be on it.”

Article by James Kent