Span Partners With LG On Intelligent Breaker Panel & Energy Storage
Span, maker of the smart electrical panel, has partnered with LG to develop a fully integrated electrical and energy management system for the home. The new offering will integrate Span’s smart panel and LG’s RESU energy storage units to give homeowners unprecedented control over their energy to enable them to use it when the want, how they want.
At its core, the new system enables customizable backup power, through the energy stored in the LG RESU. Thanks to Span’s panel, the ability to manage power in the home, whether it be for backup purposes, in the event of a planned or unplanned grid outage, seasonality, or just to save money on electricity, is increased significantly thanks to the integration of the 9.8kWh LG RESU 10H energy storage system.
“We are excited to partner with LG Chem to provide a fundamentally superior backup power solution to the market – one that puts control in the hands of the customer,” says Arch Rao, Founder and CEO of Span. “This is important for customers who are choosing clean energy alongside more intelligent and connected homes, and it’s especially important for people who are facing power outages.”
The Span panel already gives homeowners control over their home, but only on the load side of the equation. Adding and integrating an energy storage system takes the product to the next level by enabling dynamic control of loads and local storage. The move is a significant step towards the goal of the team at Span, which from day one was to address the significant opportunity that existed in “dumb” traditional electrical panels that do little more than funnel power to the circuits in the home.
The new solution from Span and LG is important as it gives homeowner full control of what is actually happening in the home electrical system at all times. This is of the utmost importance when the grid goes down, as the ability to shut off literally every vampire and active load in the home can provide critical extra minutes or hours of power for those loads in the home that truly are critical.
“The Span and LG pairing is a smart decision when you are considering investing in a home battery,” says Jeongjin Hong, Vice President of LG Chem’s home battery business. “The ability to choose how you power your home is critical during an outage. The LG home battery is a reliable power source and with Span, you can wisely spend your battery backup power.”
It also means homeowners can select which circuits can be used during a grid outage with software. Traditional battery backup systems require these circuits to be hardwired into a “critical loads panel” that cannot quickly or easily be changed. With the increasing frequency of the so-called public safety power shutoffs (PSPS) in California, the need for a true solution is very real for millions of residents up and down the state.
Span takes control a few steps further by putting control of its home energy system in the palm of homeowners’ hands through the Span smartphone app. The app enables homeowners to see how much battery backup time is remaining based on the state of charge of the LG RESU battery. From there, homeowners can optimize the home with personalized settings, intelligent load balancing, and automated scheduling.
It sounds like the one ring to rule them all from Lord of the Rings if I’m being honest, but if Span and LG can pull off what sounds like a real, viable solution for home energy management, it would be a huge step in the right direction. Intelligent full home energy management enables a better return on investment from the home energy storage system and a host of other benefits that, with Span’s smart panel, can be enabled digitally.
Homeowners also get a bonus in the form of visibility of the home energy network. The app displays helpful metrics like solar production, battery state of charge, grid power consumption, and home energy consumption at the circuit level that would otherwise have to be pulled from the solar provider’s app, the battery company’s app, and the utility app, if it is even available. Granted, there are solutions like Neurio and Sense that have similar granular monitoring capabilities, but integrating it into a single system that can then take that data and offer solutions is powerful.
The Span and LG Chem Solution is expected to launch later this year but for now, homeowners interested in adding configurable backup to their home can find more information at www.span.io/lgchem. Companies who want to apply to become a Span Certified Installer can apply through Span’s website at www.span.io/get-span. To become an LG Chem Certified Installer, companies can apply by visiting LG Chem’s website at www.lghomebattery.com.
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