With a coming imbalance likely between growing energy demand and constrained utility resources, how far can utility and customer relationship evolve and what does this mean for energy management?

This was the question posed to Prasanna Venkatesan, EVP and Head of Strategy for Landis+Gyr and Arch Rao, Founder and CEO of SPAN, on a recent edition of the Power Perspectives podcast from Energy Central.

“The biggest technological revolution is happening in our industry is happening right now. If you look at any study…everybody sees a doubling of electricity demand over the next 25 years. And we are seeing largely this demand being driven by data centers, the onshoring of major manufacturing elements coming back to us, crypto currency mining, transportation and building electrification…all of this has considerably changed the landscape,” says Venkatesan.

However, he adds that this is a huge opportunity to leverage available innovation that for the first time allows utilities and consumers to remotely monitor and manage loads at the grid edge.

Landis+Gyr’s partnership with SPAN brings together leading-edge grid-edge sensing technology, with smart panel control of high-demand circuits, to revolutionize residential and light commercial load management.

According to Rao, the incumbent model to meeting load growth, which was often incremental, was to add more poles and wires, transformers and generation capacity as needed to meet this demand. “But the pace of load growth happening now cannot be met with this solution,” he said.

Smarter solutions with the ability to control demand at the device level, he says, start with visibility into what is consuming power in real time and then provide control in a way that doesn’t negatively impact customer experience.

To hear more of this discussion, check out the full podcast here.