Press Releases, News & Technical Documents

May 23, 2019
Utility Dive – Utilities have multiple ways to drive lower energy use
The data for Kopalle’s research came from Pecan Street, an Austin-based non-profit that manages a neighborhood electricity test bed. Almost 1,000 homes have volunteered to have advanced metering infrastructure installed, capturing circuit-level, minute-by-minute consumption data along with generation data from dozens of homes with solar panels.

May 1, 2019
Pecan Street and Eaton Testing Demand Response Tech
Energy research organization Pecan Street Inc. and power management company Eaton are partnering to develop and test a next-generation residential demand response solution that will increase overall efficiency of the electric grid and optimize the use of renewable energy generation resources.

April 4, 2019
What California’s Rule 21 Gets Right and Wrong for Residential Solar
By Scott Hinson, chief technology officer, Pecan Street – Several of the requirements of California’s Rule 21 will help encourage the installation of more solar and storage. However, there are two areas where Rule 21 lacks important features or functions for improved solar integration and grid resiliency.

March 25, 2019
Data: The Fifth Utility?
By Suzanne Russo, CEO, Pecan Street – The data challenge extends far beyond Amazon, Google and Facebook. Data is everywhere. In our work at Pecan Street, conversations about distributed energy are often conversations about data.

March 19, 2019
Pecan Street Opens Applications for Second Cohort of Testing, Validation and Market Entry Program
Texas-based Pecan Street Inc. is accepting applications from energy technology startups for the second cohort of its PLATFORM for Product Launch program. Start-ups with a clean energy hardware innovation targeted at the residential and/or small commercial sectors and who have a functioning prototype can apply at pecanstreet.org/platformapp.

February 28, 2019
Pecan Street and Austin Energy Look to Bring V2G Mainstream with Possible Microgrid Applications
“The type and quality of analysis provided by research from Pecan Street will be critical in proving the feasibility of V2G for Austin and similar energy environments,” said Austin Energy’s Cameron Freberg.

February 18, 2019
Diving deeper into power factor
By Scott Hinson, chief technology officer, Pecan Street Residential solar inverters typically only provide real power to the electrical grid. When they do that, the reactive power component (either the displacement or distortion current) isn’t affected. It stays on the grid. The real power draw of the house is minimized or even completely canceled. This means that the utility has to deal with the portions of the load – called reactive power – that reduce power factor.

February 14, 2019
Greentech Media: Vehicle-to-Grid Testing Comes to Texas
Pecan Street Inc., an Austin-based energy research organization, and the publicly owned electric utility Austin Energy launched what they say is Texas’ first grid-tied vehicle-to-grid (V2G) research and testing center.

February 13, 2019
Pecan Street to Conduct Field Testing and Data Management for $2.9 Million ARPA-E Study on HVAC Efficiency
Austin-based Pecan Street Inc. will conduct the field testing and data management for a University of Michigan study that will tackle two of the electricity industry’s biggest – management of renewables intermittency and management of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) load growth – the latter of which is projected to be one of the top drivers of global electricity demand and carbon emissions over the next few decades.