PG&E Partners with SPAN to Accelerate Home Electrification with Load Management Technology

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) announced a strategic collaboration with SPAN to deploy the company’s SPAN Edge solution to help customers electrify their homes more affordably and efficiently.

SPAN Edge is an at-the-meter device that enables real-time load management and allows homes to add new electric appliances or electric vehicle charging without electric panel or service upgrades, which are often cited as a major barrier to residential electrification.

PG&E will deploy the SPAN Edge devices alongside next-generation metering infrastructure through its new PanelBoost program. The initiative is designed to reduce upgrade costs for customers adopting electric vehicles, heat pumps, induction cooking, and other high-efficiency electric technologies.

The utility estimates that more than 600,000 homes in its service area may require some type of electric service upgrade in the next decade to meet growing electrification demand.

"PG&E is committed to helping our customers electrify affordably while maintaining a reliable, resilient grid," said Mike Delaney, Vice President of Strategy & Innovation, PG&E. "Our work with SPAN aims to enable thousands of households to add electric appliances and EVs faster and without more costly panel and electric system upgrades."

PG&E joins other energy companies and grid partners, including Landis+Gyr, in utilizing SPAN Edge to support customer electrification and manage distribution system upgrades.

"Our partnership with PG&E is a critical step in making home electrification affordable and accessible," said Arch Rao, CEO of SPAN. "By deploying SPAN Edge at scale, we are helping PG&E customers bypass the traditional 'panel bottleneck' and accelerate the transition to clean energy."

A Scalable Approach to Load Growth

SPAN Edge uses a Dynamic Service Rating™ capability to shape home energy demand during peak events, with the goal of protecting local electric transformers and supporting grid reliability. The technology is part of PG&E’s broader grid-edge research and innovation strategy focused on smart-panel and meter-socket-based solutions intended to reduce the need for service upgrades.

Electricians and installers who participated in early PanelBoost feedback sessions said the program could help customers avoid electric panel service upgrades.

"PG&E just made it possible to effectively have a 200-amp panel by throttling the loads in their house," one installer noted. Customer testers indicated they would have considered this pathway before pursuing traditional upgrade work.

Building on Previous Virtual Power Plant Efforts

The SPAN Edge deployment builds on lessons from PG&E’s Seasonal Aggregation of Versatile Energy (SAVE) virtual power plant program, which aggregated residential distributed energy resources to help mitigate local grid constraints.

According to the company, SPAN’s existing customer-sited infrastructure and Dynamic Service Rating™ capability provided load-shaping functionality and analytics during prior efforts, and future virtual power plants could expand on those benefits through at-the-meter technologies such as SPAN Edge.

With California’s energy demand expected to increase due to transportation and building electrification, PanelBoost is designed to align with California Energy Commission forecasts and support customer transitions.

The program is part of PG&E’s broader innovation implementation strategy, which incorporates customer research, market analysis, and lessons from earlier technology demonstrations.

Cost and Deployment Plans

SPAN Edge devices are installed at the electric meter. PG&E said the devices can offer a lower-cost alternative to traditional service upgrades, which can range from $6,000 to $40,000 and take months to complete. By comparison, the cost estimate for a customer to hire an electrician to install a SPAN Edge device through PanelBoost could range from $500 to $2,000, depending on several factors.

Under the program, PG&E will supply the SPAN Edge device as an add-on to the customer’s electric meter. Customers will be responsible for the cost of hiring an electrician to install the device and for wiring any new appliances or loads connected to it.

PG&E plans to launch a website with additional information about the SPAN Edge PanelBoost offering in summer 2026. The utility said it intends to initially scale the devices to thousands of customers when the program begins later this summer, with further expansion over the next several years.