E111: The Span Plan: Grid Infrastructure in Your Garage
The humble electrical panel is the blocker to a lot of electrification, but Span's sexy smart panels are the unlock
It is possible that the reason you haven’t bought an EV is that you don’t want to do an expensive electrical upgrade for the at-home charger. It’s something that stops a lot of people, and the humble garage panel is both the blocker and the potential enabler of a whole bunch of electrification.
This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re taking a second look at the humble electrical panel with Arch Rao, founder and CEO of Span. Span makes a very slick, very smart electrical panel that could turn out to be one of the most important tools for electrifying homes — and maybe even the grid.
Span’s whole pitch is simple and surprising: most homes don’t actually need more power. They just need smarter power management.
Why the Smart Panel Matters
Most homes in America have 100-amp service, and for decades that was totally fine. But now we’re adding EV chargers and heat pumps and electric water heaters and rooftop solar and batteries — and suddenly everyone is being told they need to upgrade to 200 amps or more.
But in reality, homes almost never hit their full capacity. Arch told me homes only bump up against their limit for something like 10 hours a year. So instead of ripping out wires and upgrading transformers and spending five or ten or twenty thousand dollars, Span steps in and manages the peaks — throttling the EV charger for a few minutes, pausing a heating element, smoothing out the spikes, and keeping everything running.
In other words: electrify everything, without the utility upgrade.
And yes… there’s an app. And you will absolutely check it too often. And you will absolutely show people your circuit-level data at dinner parties (maybe that’s just my nerdy circle? Probably.)
Turning Homes into Grid Assets
Here’s where things get even more interesting.
Utilities — including PG&E — are starting to look at Span as grid infrastructure, not just a homeowner upgrade. Because if you can avoid upgrading a whole neighborhood’s transformers and instead just give everyone a smart, flexible panel, that’s much cheaper, much faster, and a lot more elegant.
Arch told me Span could double the usable capacity of the existing grid without adding new wires.
Considering all the conversations I’ve been having and will be having about spiking load growth. data center power needs, and electrification demands, the ability to harvest untapped energy resources without more infrastructure is huge.
The best part is that once you have a bunch of these panels in the wild, every house becomes a tiny energy control center that can shift demand, help stabilize the grid, and participate in virtual power plants. It’s decentralization meets electrification meets resilience, and you know how I feel about that. (I LOVE IT.)
Listen to the Episode
You can listen to the full conversation here and learn more about Span and find an installer here.
If you want to support the show directly, and get an ad-free version, consider becoming a paid subscriber!
And finally, let me know what you think — have you run into panel upgrade problems? Would you install a smart panel? I’d love to hear your stories, and I hope to get a Span installed in 2026 and share my experience and my review.
As always, thank you for listening, reading, and being in this pool with me.
Together, we can get this done.
This has been an overlooked area for improvement, so obvious in hindsight. Bravo.