Phase 1: Service Upgrade

Most homes are currently wired with 100A coming to the house and connecting into a 100A main panel. Historically this is plenty for most homes that use natural gas, but not enough to simultaneously power everything if it's all electric. There simply isn't enough capacity to, say, charge 2 cars, dry clothes, and cook at the same time. 

There are a few solutions to this:

• Change behavior to not charge cars, dry clothes, and cook at the same time. While this is do-able, we're never going to convince millions of households to voluntarily electrify if they have to change behavior. We need to make the clean future MORE attractive, not less.
• Upgrade service to 200A. This involves an electrician, city inspection, and utility inspection. Plus buying and installing an upgraded main panel designed for the increased load
• Get a load shifting smart panel. New products on the market like Span can automatically and dynamically adjust loads to keep your system functioning. Have spare capacity? Charge the car faster. Need to wash clothes? Stop charging the car. 

These aren't mutually exclusive. For example, we probably will want both a service upgrade and a smart panel. 

The service upgrade is one of our first priorities. We don't want to be in a situation in the future where, say, our hot water tank breaks, but we can't switch to electric because our house can't handle the increased load. And since it can take weeks or months to get a service upgrade (city inspection, utility inspection, and actually finding an electrician who can start work), which is too long to go without hot water. 

Oh, and the service upgrade is sorta forcing our hand to decide on a smart panel now. We likely don't want to buy an upgraded panel now, only to replace it with a Span down the road -- that's just wasteful. And we'll also want our (eventual) storage batteries connected to the smart panel. No sense hardwiring them up to our critical loads, only to rewire it to a smart panel later. So this adds more moving parts to Phase 1, but it's probably the better plan.

PS a smart panel and a smart meter are different. Most modern homes have smart meters... they send your usage data back to the utility without a human coming out to read the meter. Quite common and you'd never know it. Smart panels are very new innovations. Your circuit breaker goes inside the smart panel, automatically controls where power is flowing in your house, and gives you a pretty mobile app to control it all.