Span smart panel expands homebuilder/utility footprint with additional form factors
It has been a big few weeks for smart electrical panel-maker Span. The company announced major deals with Pulte Homes and utilities with Landis + Gyr. The startup also expanded its lineup to include small home and apartment-sized panels and even subpanels
But firstly, why do we even need $3500 smart electric panels?
We last caught up to Span last year when they announced a smart EV charger and funding.
Founded by the former head of Powerwall development and Tesla Energy Arch Rao, Span has been creating smart circuit breaker boxes for homes for a few years.
Rao left Tesla in 2018 at a tumultuous time when Tesla was diverting Gigafactory Nevada batteries from home storage into its new Model 3 and was also fumbling its solar roof efforts while managing its controversial Solar City acquisition.
Span smart circuit boxes were launched in 2020 at a price of $7000 and require specialized electrician installations in low numbers.
Since then, the price has halved to $3500 (or $2900 after the IRA tax credit), and the number of Span installers has expanded, leading to much lower costs and, with this week’s announcements, much-expanded capabilities.
Why Span smart circuit breaker boxes?
As people dump petroleum-based vehicles and home heating and move to EVs and heat pumps, the electrical service lines that homes use are getting taxed. Even 240V/200A service, which a few years ago was very high end, can almost entirely be used up by a few EVs and a whole-house heat pump system. An 80A EV charger will take close to half of 200A service.
With dumb panels, electricians are limited to those 200A, or they’re forced to bring in more power from the street, which can cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars along with a lot of time and effort.
Enter the smart panel. Span panels can monitor home power usage and turn off high-power-use items like car chargers, pool pumps, and water heaters when the capacity starts to fill up. Users can set priorities, and there are 32 different smart breakers to wire up many household items.
Solar and Batteries
It isn’t just EVs and heat pumps that are going into new homes. More and more people are looking to solar and battery storage to help mitigate energy costs and outages. These each require a huge breaker and, on dumb panels, eat into those allotted 200A.
Span helps manage these pieces of technology as well. Span can set the home to be run off solar and save energy-intensive operations like charging EVs and Powerwalls for low-energy-cost timeframes.
Obviously, with Rao’s history with Tesla, Powerwalls, Tesla inverters, solar panels, and gateways are fully supported. But other major batteries, such as Franklin WH, Enphase IQ Battery, and LG Chem RESU2 SolarEdge Energy Bank, are also supported.
Span Announcements
Span announced this week that smaller 24-circuit and 16-circuit model boxes are available for smaller homes, apartments, and commercial usage. These can also be utilized as smart subpanels, and there’s even a panel with a built-in meter that is being tested and readied by utilities (details forthcoming).
There’s also a bigger 48-breaker panel coming for new homes. Prices aren’t set yet, and obviously, installers will get discounted prices in bulk.
More announcements are expected in the next few months, which should be exciting for Span.
Electrek’s take:
As I’ve added solar, batteries, EVs, and heat pumps, not just for HVAC but also for water heating and clothes washing, I’m feeling the strain on my 200A service. Our electrician initially recommended running another 200A line that would cost over $10,000. Another option was only having 1 EV charger (which we split with a Neocharge)
Installing a Span will run a fraction of the cost, allow us to add EV chargers and, as a bonus, will allow me to better monitor and control the loads going into and out of my home. That will also save money in the short term and we’ll likely be able to move to better rate plans in the longer term.
I’m fairly confident that I won’t need to do much in the way of mitigation because our house, when not heating and car charging, uses less than 2kW of electricity out of the 50kW coming in. We’ve also removed 240V dryers and replaced them with 120V heat pump modelss and are moving from a 240V water heater to a 120V heat pump water heater.
I’ll have a review of the Span after my upgrade is done in a few months.
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EV sales kept up their momentum in December 2024, with incentives playing a big role, according to the latest Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book report.
December’s strong EV sales saw an average transaction price (ATP) of $55,544, which helped push the industry-wide ATP higher, according to Kelley Blue Book. The December ATP for an EV was higher year-over-year by 0.8%, slightly below the industry average, and higher month-over-month by 1.1%. Tesla ATPs were higher year-over-year by 10.5%.
Incentives for EVs remained elevated in December, although they were slightly lower month-over-month at 14.3% of ATP, down from 14.7% in November.
EV incentives were higher by an impressive 41% year-over-year and have been above 12% of ATP for six consecutive months. Strong sales incentives, which averaged more than $6,700 per sale in 2024, were one reason EV sales surpassed 1.3 million units last year, according to Cox Automotive, a new record for volume and share.
(My colleague Jameson Dow reported yesterday, “In 2024, the world sold 3.5 million more EVs than it did in the previous year … This increase is larger than the 3.2 million increase in EV sales from the previous year – meaning that EV sales aren’t just up, but that the rate of growth is itself increasing.”)
Kelley Blue Book estimated that in December, approximately 84,000 vehicles – or 5.6% of total sales – transacted at prices higher than $80,000 – the highest volume ever. KBB lumps gas cars and EVs together into this luxury vehicle category, so this is where Tesla Cybertruck is slotted.
However, Tesla bundles sales figures of Cybertruck with Model S, Model X, and Tesla Semi(!) into a category it calls “other models,” so we don’t know for sure exactly how many Cybertrucks Tesla sold in Q4, much less in December. However, Electrek‘s Fred Lambert estimates between 9,000 and 12,000 Cybertrucks were sold in Q4, and that’s not a stellar sales figure.
What will January bring when it comes to EV ATPs? What about tax credits? Check back in a month and I’ll fill you in.
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Tesla is now claiming that Cybertruck was the ‘best-selling electric pickup in US’ last year despite not even reporting the number of deliveries.
There’s a lot of context needed here.
As we often highlighted, Tesla is sadly one of, if not the most, opaque automakers regarding sales reports.
Tesla doesn’t break down sales per model or even region.
For comparison, here’s Ford’s Q4 2024 sales report compared to Tesla’s:
You could argue that Tesla has fewer models than Ford, and that’s true, but Tesla’s report literally has two lines despite having six different models.
There’s no reason not to offer a complete breakdown like all other automakers other than trying to make it hard to verify the health of each vehicle program.
This has been the case with the Cybertruck. Tesla is bundling its Cybertruck deliveries with Model S, Model X, and Tesla Semi deliveries.
Despite this lack of disclosure, Tesla has been able to claim that the Cybertruck has become “the best-selling electric pickup truck” in the US in 2024:
It very well might be true. Ford disclosed 33,510 F-150 Lightning truck deliveries in the US in 2024 while most estimates are putting Cybertruck deliveries at around 40,000 units.
Those are global deliveries, but Tesla only delivered the Cybertruck in the US, Canada, and Mexico in 2024, and most of the deliveries are believed to be in the US.
However, there’s essential context needed here, as we highlighted in our recent ‘Tesla Cybertruck sales are disastrous‘ article.
First off, Tesla had a backlog of over 1 million reservations for the Cybertruck that it has been building since 2019. This led many to believe Tesla already had years of demand baked in for the truck and that production would be the constraint.
However, based on estimates, again, because Tesla refuses to disclose the data, Cybertruck deliveries were either flat or down in Q4 versus Q3 despite Tesla introducing cheaper versions of the vehicle and ramping up production.
Again, that’s after just about 40,000 deliveries.
Furthermore, with almost 11,000 deliveries in Q4 in the US, Ford more likely than not outsold Cybertruck with the F-150 Lightning in Q4.
Electrek’s Take
Tesla is in damage control here. There’s no doubt that it is having issues selling the Cybertruck.
Inventory is full of Cybertrucks and Tesla is now discounting them and offering free lifetime Supercharging.
Tesla is great at ramping up production, and it’s clear the Cybertruck is not production-constrained anymore. It is demand-constrained despite having over 1 million reservations.
Again, those reservations were made before Tesla unveiled the production version, which happened to have less range and cost significantly more.
The upcoming cheaper single motor version should help with demand, but I have serious doubts Tesla can ramp this program up to more than 100,000 units in the US.
As a reminder, Tesla installed a production capacity of 250,000 units annually and Musk said he could see Tesla selling 500,000 Cybertrucks per year.
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