Monthly Archives: July 2012

Pecan Street Inc. seeks a Data Engineer for management of Pecan Street data acquisition, integration, validation, storage and database quality. This position will require close collaboration with the organization’s staff, funded researchers and the Texas Advanced Computing Center. About Pecan Street Pecan Street Inc. is a clean energy/smart grid research and development organization headquartered at […] Read More »

Maybe it should be renamed "Chevrolet Volt-ville." The largest concentration of Chevrolet Volts in the country will play a key role in helping Texas residents in a 700-acre planned community as they test the impact of "smart homes" and other green technology, like electronic vehicles. Read More »

"We hope Pecan Street’s research will speed up the innovation cycle around smart grid and consumer electronic technology. Electric vehicles represent a significant addition to home’s energy profile and understanding that impact and how consumers use and charge their vehicles is critically important," said Pecan Street executive director Brewster McCracken. Read More »

Last October, General Motors pledged to make up to 100 Chevy Volt plug-in hybrids available to the Pecan Street Project, the Austin, Texas smart grid integration project that wants to find ways to make car charging, home energy, solar power and the grid play nicely together. Then, in February, GM’s OnStar service announced it was developing a set of APIs to help utilities and Volt-owning customers manage the way those plug-in cars charge. On Tuesday, those two projects came together in the form of a pledge from GM to partner with Pecan Street in a real-world test of those APIs to manage the real world Volts now being bought by residents of the Austin neighborhood chosen for the project. Read More »

Pecan Street Inc. has a smart-grid research project in Austin, Texas' sustainable Mueller community. The area has the highest residential concentration of Chevy Volt owners, with 55 in total, OnStar says. At total of 66 residents who own an electric vehicle are participating. Others own Nissan Leaf and Mitsubishi i-MiEV electric vehicles. Read More »

Talk about high Volt-age. A neighborhood in Austin, Texas, designed to be a test bed for green technologies and that, according to General Motors, boasts the highest concentration of electric cars in the U.S. will become a laboratory for how the vehicles and their drivers interact with a smart power grid, homes and renewable energy systems. Read More »

Plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles will play an integral role in the demonstration. “Electric vehicles represent a significant addition to a home’s energy profile, and understanding that impact and how consumers use and charge their vehicles is critically important,” Brewster McCracken, executive director of Pecan Street, said in a media release. Read More »

How would you like your electricity usage monitored? The residents on Pecan Street, located in the Mueller community of Austin, Texas, are soon going to find out. For the next five years, their electricity usage will be monitored by researchers from the University of Texas, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the Environmental Defense Fund as well as private companies such as General Motors. Read More »

Last week, a powerful "derecho" storm hammered the mid-Atlantic region, snuffing out power during the peak of a sweltering heat wave for nearly a week in some homes. Days later, our science correspondent Miles O'Brien traveled to Austin, Tex. to look at a neighborhood that operates on a smart grid. That means it's much less prone to losing power - and A.C. - during a mass outage. Read More »

Miles O'Brien examines power grid reliability in a neighborhood near Austin, Texas that uses "smart grid" technology to track - and control - its energy consumption. Read More »