Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) and Itron are advancing the next phase of their collaboration to improve grid reliability, support electric vehicle (EV) adoption, and reduce wildfire risk. Building on their existing EV Connect partnership, PG&E is expanding the deployment of Itron’s Grid Edge intelligence to better manage electrification at the customer level while improving grid awareness and operational efficiency.
Learn more about Itron’s Grid Edge intelligence solution here.
The expanded collaboration focuses on enabling more affordable home EV charging and electrification, improving grid visibility and response times, and reducing operations and maintenance costs by extracting greater value from existing infrastructure.
Using distributed intelligence, Itron grid edge devices can connect directly to compatible Level 2 EV chargers and automatically adjust charging speeds based on a home’s electrical capacity and local grid conditions. This approach helps protect household electrical panels and can eliminate the need for costly service upgrades, which often delay or prevent EV charger installations. For customers with smaller panels, particularly those under 150 amps, this technology removes a major barrier to EV ownership.
While the initial use case centers on EV charging, the same approach could eventually support additional electric appliances such as heat pumps and electric water heaters without requiring panel or service upgrades, lowering the cost of broader home electrification.
Beyond the home, grid edge intelligence improves PG&E’s ability to monitor and respond to grid conditions in near real time. Distributed applications running on Itron devices can detect changes on the grid in less than one second, providing early indication of equipment issues, line disturbances, or abnormal electrical activity. This enhanced visibility helps PG&E reduce outage duration, improve load management as electrification increases, and identify potential equipment related wildfire risks sooner.
PG&E plans to install up to 1,000 new Itron devices through 2026, with the potential to scale to hundreds of thousands of devices by 2030. These deployments will inform PG&E’s long term advanced metering and grid modernization strategy.
The collaboration is partially funded through PG&E’s electric research and development program under the Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC), a public purpose initiative that supports the demonstration of technologies that advance safety, reliability, affordability, environmental sustainability, and equity for California electric customers.
Filed Under: Charging, Technology News