Smarter electrical panels: A win for all

The latest in real estate technology

April 23rd, 2025

First things first: Fifth Wall portfolio company Merlin Solar, a leader in revolutionizing solar renewable energy for rooftops and mobile environments, announced two new executive leaders this week: Kendall Combs will take the helm as Chief Executive Officer, with Ian VanReepinghen serving as Chief Financial Officer. We're excited to see these leaders grow what is already a standout business; as per the official press release, "[the company has] nearly doubled its revenue the past two years and [achieved] 75% YoY growth in the transportation segment."

SPAN's new edge: Smarter electrical panels are a win for all

Today, we're excited to highlight a new product release from SPAN, a Fifth Wall portfolio company that has spent more than five years revolutionizing electrical panels to accelerate built environment transformation.

Electrical panels help harmonize energy generation, storage, delivery, and management in many types of buildings across the built environment. Think of them like a control room for a building's power and electrical infrastructure. Whether you think of them or not, they're constantly at work, managing electricity flows and mitigating physical hazards like grid overloads.

Not all electrical panels are built equally, however. Plenty of homes in the U.S. have electrical panels that haven't been upgraded since the home was first built; often, the same panel installed during initial construction may still be hard at work. That breeds opportunity: More sophisticated, "smart" electrical panels can unlock cost savings for building owners and operators, whether by reducing the time and cost of electrical infrastructure upgrades or creating opportunities to participate in demand response programs. And that's where SPAN comes in.

1. A strong foundation: SPAN's existing success

SPAN's first smart electrical panels, which it debuted in 2019, already represented a much-needed step change for the intersection of energy and the built environment. Its first smartphone-controllable electrical panel was designed to help homeowners manage energy generation and storage assets like solar panels, batteries, EV chargers, and HVAC systems proactively, in real time. As buildings integrate more electric hardware (in lieu of, say, natural gas or fuel-oil-fired appliances), electrical panels that offer users more insights and control into a building's comprehensive energy ecosystem become increasingly important.

In the words of Arch Rao, SPAN's Founder and CEO, the company's products help homeowners:

“...seamlessly add solar, batteries, EV chargers, heat pumps, and induction cooktops without the added cost and hassle of major panel upgrades.”

Since its formation, the adoption of the technologies that SPAN's panels help homeowners and installers integrate and manage more effectively has ballooned. This remains the case, with sales accelerating, macroeconomic and policy uncertainties notwithstanding. For example, EV sales in the U.S. still grew 10% year over year in Q1. More EVs on roads = more homes that need EV chargers.

2. The next phase: Harder, better, faster, stronger

Building on its robust product lineup, SPAN released its latest product, SPAN Edge, last month. SPAN Edge is designed specifically to extend the benefits of its existing products to utilities. As Rao discussed when first unveiling the product at Distributech, a utility trade show in Dallas, SPAN Edge is SPAN's effort to "expand way beyond a homeowner or installer-led adoption of the product, to becoming part of the utility infrastructure.” (h/t Jeff St. John for highlighting this quote).

Like the rest of SPAN's product line, the benefits of SPAN Edge include:

Device-level visibility & control: SPAN Edge provides utilities with a more advanced level of granular data monitoring and control, the same way it does for homeowners. This allows utilities to glean far more specific, actionable insight into the dynamics of energy flows in a home, which is often not something they have historically had access to.

Then there are elements of SPAN Edge that are unique to utilities, too.

Seamless, at-the-meter installation: SPAN Edge can be installed directly at the utility meter and set up by a utility technician in 15 minutes. It doesn't require comprehensive overhauls or renovation, which saves time and money across many dimensions. In Rao's words:

"Imagine a process that takes just 15 minutes: the existing smart meter is temporarily removed, a collar (the meter extension) is placed, and the original meter is reinstalled.... This seemingly simple addition acts as a distribution box in every home, providing the necessary infrastructure to support full electrification.”

Further, SPAN Edge also offers:

Proactive risk mitigation and load management: Beyond real-time data, SPAN Edge gives utilities more capacity to understand and dynamically manage energy flows in houses. This is beneficial both for safety and reliability reasons, as well as to expand the economic opportunities inherent to built environment transformation.

While economic benefits and emissions reductions are certainly a priority for utilities as with any other stakeholder, their ultimate prerogatives are grid reliability and safety. SPAN Edge delivers value to them on this front because the more insight they have into the real-time data of what's happening house to house and how energy-intensive appliances, like EV chargers, impact or even imperil broader electrical infrastructure, the more proactively they can mitigate risks, like overloading local transformers or electricity distribution equipment.

Rao built on these ideas in our video interview, where he emphasized the importance of allowing utilities to literally and metaphorically "plug" into the more sophisticated and powerful management tools that SPAN's existing product suite already offers to other built environment stakeholders:

“Utilities gain enhanced capabilities for balancing electrical loads across their network, improving grid stability and efficiency."

Beyond risk mitigation and boosts to reliability, SPAN Edge can also help utilities aggregate and manage distributed loads across many households. In turn, this can help utilities extend the economic benefits of SPAN's products for homeowners beyond participation in demand response programs to participation in virtual power plant (VPP) programs, unlocking new revenue streams in addition to the cost-saving outcomes SPAN has already helped people capitalize on for years.

3. Great conductors make for great concerts

With the addition of SPAN Edge, SPAN's product line now offers benefits to a wider range of stakeholders, utilities chief among them. While the benefits each party gains from SPAN's products often overlap in nature, it's valuable to zoom out and appreciate that SPAN's products do more than simplify installations, save cost, and open up new revenue streams. SPAN's products also act as a sort of "conductor" for the full orchestra of processes, infrastructure, and stakeholders that need to work together harmoniously in the built environment.

When all these processes, products, and stakeholders work in "concert" with one another, everyone benefits. While SPAN's products help harmonize energy at the household level, they also foster alignment, coordination, and collaboration among all the stakeholders whose buy-in and proactive participation help accelerate built environment transformation.

Dive deeper into the conversation

Eager to learn even more on SPAN's tech and Rao's vision for it? Check out our recently released video:

Powering the Electrification Revolution: SPAN's Game-Changing Meter Extension

STORIES WE READ THIS WEEK

TARIFF TURBULENCE

“Nowhere to go”: How tariffed companies weigh costly restructures vs. hunkering down and riding it out

MORE TARIFF / TRADE TROUBLE

Trump’s Trade War Is Threatening to Derail the Office-Market Recovery

RESILIENT REAL ESTATE SECTORS

Multifamily Resilience Continues Despite Economic Uncertainty

A BOOST FOR GREENER BUILDINGS?

Bipartisan bill to boost green building materials glides through House

NOVEL INSURANCE EXPERIMENTS

The Nature Conservancy and Willis Launch First-of-Its-Kind Wildfire Resilience Insurance

RETURN TO OFFICE; STILL UNDERWAY

Remote Work Drop Signals Shift in Rental Market and Housing Trends

IT'S A BIG WORLD OUT THERE

Africa Energy: A $150 Million PE Fund to Green 30,000 Buildings

👀 WORTH A LOOK

Visualized: The Cost of Building a New Home in the U.S. (Visual Capitalist)

Notwithstanding what new tariffs could mean for core construction input costs (for more on that, see here and here), the above from Visual Capitalist offers a comprehensive view of modal U.S. housing construction costs today.

FUN FINDS

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Rabbits on the plane: A flight from Denver to Edmonton had to (safely) reroute after the aircraft ingested a rabbit through its engine.
Fool me once...: Fyre Festival 2 has been postponed indefinitely . Bet no one saw that coming.
Same team, new tool: The Yankees’ viral ‘torpedo’ bats were designed by an MIT physicist

Comments or questions? Reach us at newsletter@fifthwall.com

Fifth Wall
66 Hudson Blvd E Suite 5340 / 53rd Floor
New York, New York 10001

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