September 20, 2018
Thanks to a consortium of funders led by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Pecan Street is expanding its home energy research network to California’s Bay Area and the Ithaca area in upstate New York.
Through collaborations with the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University in New York and Stanford, U.C. Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, these new research networks will help answer critical questions about transforming our energy systems.
Pecan Street is already recruiting participants in the Ithaca area to take part in the New York energy research network. Single-family, owner-occupied homes with wireless Internet are eligible to participate. Pecan Street will collect interest from households through May 2018, and will then select the homes for participation.
To sign up, please read and sign this electronic participation agreement.
Participation is free and involves an electrician coming out to your home and installing a home energy monitoring system. In addition to providing critical data for researchers working to make our energy systems cleaner, more resilient and more affordable, participants also get access to their own detailed home energy data through our secure portal, Pecan Street HomeHub.
Please visit our Participant Resources page to read about other volunteers’ experience participating with Pecan Street, read our Privacy Policy, and watch a few brief videos about our work.
Cornell professor of civil and environmental engineering, Edwin (Todd) Cowen, is a member of the Pecan Street Inc. board of directors and will be a key local contact for Pecan Street’s researchers.
Pecan Street’s research network currently includes 850 homes, the majority of which have been participating with Pecan Street for over five years. To date, the majority of the homes in Pecan Street’s volunteer research network are in Texas.
“Expanding to different climates with different energy profiles will allow us to tackle new research questions critical for these two states to move forward with their aggressive clean energy goals,” says Pecan Street CEO Suzanne Russo.
New York’s REV (Reforming the Energy Vision) has made energy research and development a key economic driver for the state. California is supporting a rapid transformation of the electric grid and integration of distributed energy resources, including a goal to have all new construction zero-net-energy by 2030 and a requirement that all new construction include solar PV.
Participation in Pecan Street’s research is voluntary, confidential, secure and free.
Watch a 2012 story from PBS News Hour, below.
About Pecan Street Inc.
Pecan Street is a non-profit energy and water research organization based in Austin, TX. Our network of volunteer research participants is the first of its kind on the planet and has become an international model for how to develop and operate real-world energy and resource research. Our commercialization lab is an affordable, world-class proving ground for major corporations and startups alike. And our database, the largest source of disaggregated customer energy data, is used by university researchers and industry-leading companies around the world.
