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T&D World: The Energy Switch—A Residential Microgrid
By Scott Hinson, CTO, Pecan Street - The Energy Switch is designed to turn an unreliable generation resource that requires close attention by a utility into a much more beneficial load on the system.
Fully Charged Show Visits Pecan Street
The Pecan Street staff hosted Chelsea Sexton from Fully Charged a few weeks ago as they toured some of Austin’s energy-tech hotspots. Watch the Pecan Street episode here.
On COP 25 “Ambition Day,” Pecan Street Announces Soil Research Initiative
By Suzanne Russo, CEO, Pecan Street – The scale of the climate change challenge requires solutions of equal scale, and carbon sequestration within farmland soils offers a unique opportunity to reduce emissions. We believe the Pecan Street model can help to accelerate progress toward realizing the potential of this critical carbon sink.
Greentech Media: A Texas-Sized Gas-for-Electricity Swap
Converting Texas homes to electric heat would reduce climate-warming pollution, save Texas households up to $452 annually on their utility bills, and flip the state from a summer-peaking to a winter-peaking system.
IEEE Spectrum: A Plug-and-Play Microgrid for Rooftop Solar
By Scott Hinson, CTO, Pecan Street - Pecan Street designed and built a residential energy-storage system that turns a home into its own microgrid. It’s a solution that addresses all of solar’s integration issues at once.
ZDNet: How autonomous vehicles will change car ownership
Pecan Street in Austin ran an eight-month pilot project in three neighborhoods, where residents could hail the shuttle with a text, phone call, or via the app. They could be picked up anywhere in the service area and go to any destination within the service area.
Pecan Street @ 10: The Mother of All Energy and Water Databases
By Grant Fisher, chief information officer, Pecan Street – Our greatest technical accomplishment is the development of the largest database of real-world energy and water use on the planet. But we didn’t set out to create the mother of all energy and water databases. Honest.
Utility Dive: ERCOT weathers steamy August, but could Texas become a winter-peaking system?
Shifting from gas to electricity for winter heating "would result in increased winter electricity demand peaks," the report found. "When combined with the reduction in summer peak demand, the increase in winter peak demand would flip Texas from a 'summer peaking' to a 'winter peaking' system."
E&E News: Blackouts are on the rise. So Austin is making a ‘microgrid’
Scott Hinson is the chief technology officer for Pecan Street Inc., a nonprofit research organization that focuses on ways to spread solar power to reduce the use of fossil fuels in electricity generation. Pecan Street is located in the Mueller neighborhood and has organized some volunteer homeowners to participate in the blackout experiment. It might expose them to infrequent losses of power.
Pecan Street Whitepaper Examines Emission and Grid Impact of All-Electric Residential Heating in Texas
A study commissioned by Pecan Street Inc. examining the possibility of converting single-family residential heating in the ERCOT service area from natural gas to electric power concluded that the state could achieve significant reductions in climate and local air pollution and save Texans money through lower monthly utility bills.
E&E News Visits Pecan Street on their Electric Road Trip
Pecan Street hosted Edward Klump and Mike Lee from E&E News as they started their 1,000 mile journey from Houston to Nashville in an EV. Along the way, they're stopping to write and share news about what's happening in this fast-growing market. Review their Week One video recap and read their blog post that dives into our vehicle to grid research.
How is an Electric Grid Like an Octopus?
By Suzanne Russo, CEO, Pecan Street – We know that achieving the kind of emission reductions we’ll need to ward off the worst consequences of climate change will require a more flexible, responsive and sophisticated grid. And that will take new thinking. But when it comes to rethinking our grid, we may have some guidance from natural systems that were designed long before the first watt ever powered a lightbulb.
Pecan Street @ 10: Putting People and Privacy First in a Data-Centric World
By Suzanne Russo, CEO, Pecan Street – We may be in the research field, but with our participants, we’re in the trust business. The reason we have been able to develop our new technologies and share the research insights we’ve discovered over the last ten years is that regular people have been willing to share their information with us.
Austin SHINES testing solar + batteries as a clean, dispatchable grid solution
By Andrea Tosi, power systems specialist, Pecan Street Solar energy is ideal as a clean energy resource in places like Texas, where sunshine is abundant. But even in Texas, the sun doesn’t shine 24/7. This variability results in reliability issues for the grid. Energy Storage Systems (ESS) are crucial as solar penetration increases in Austin.
Dataport update brings new URL, new UI and new Data
By Grant Fisher, chief information officer, Pecan Street Thanks to feedback and requests from users like you and a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Dataport is now better than ever. Most importantly, the Dataport website has moved to dataport.pecanstreet.org. In addition, the redesigned site features a more user-friendly interface that makes it easier to find and use the data you need.
Pecan Street at 10: A Decade of Energy Innovation and Invention
By Colin Rowan, director of communication, Pecan Street – 2019 marks Pecan Street’s 10-year anniversary, and we’re thrilled to report that it’s been an incredible decade of innovation, invention, insight, and progress. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing what we think all of our individual accomplishments add up to — Pecan Street’s 10-Year Top 10.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pecan Street Launches Texas’ First Grid-Connected Vehicle-to-Grid Research and Testing Center
Pecan Street Inc. launched Texas’ first grid-tied vehicle-to-grid (V2G) testing center at its lab in Austin, Texas, turning electric vehicles into a dispatchable load shaving tool for municipally-owned electric utility, Austin Energy.
Tendril Acquires EEme to Unlock Appliance-Level Energy Insights
EEMe CEO and founder Enes Hosgor told Greentech Media in 2015 that its Pecan Street tests broke new ground for the energy disaggregation industry in terms of the scale and openness of its testing. “If you don’t have that insight in public, you cannot have a benchmark, a reference point, to move the entire knowledge base forward,” he said.
What 1-second data can tell you about voltage and solar
By Suzanne Russo, CEO, Pecan Street One topic we’ve been focusing on recently is voltage stabilization. It’s not sexy, but it’s important. In short, the goal is to keep voltage on the grid as constant as possible. A number of things upset that constancy, and operators have developed a number of responses, from load shifting to capacitor banks, reactors and more.
Annual report and year end review.
By Suzanne Russo, CEO, Pecan Street The past year was one of successes, reflection and transition at Pecan Street, and we’re proud to share with you how we’ve continued — and expanded — the organization’s commitment to world-class energy and water research. You can download the entire Annual Report here.
Live from Texas, it is “Vehicle-to-Grid”!
By Andrea Tosi, power systems specialist, Pecan Street We hit an important energy milestone recently with the installation of an electric vehicle (EV) charger that can charge from and discharge to the grid – a bidirectional flow of energy known as Vehicle-to-Grid, or V2G. For the first time in Austin, and possibly in Texas, energy was transferred from an electric vehicle’s battery pack to the electric grid’s distribution feeder.
Power factor – a little known feature of a reliable grid
By Scott Hinson, chief technology officer, Pecan Street Power factor is a measurement distribution engineers use to figure out how difficult it is to provide power to whatever we plug in. Every device that pulls electricity from the grid, from a small phone charger to large industrial loads, has a power factor that can be measured. Exactly what is power factor (or PF)? The easiest way to understand it is to see it.
Big data, anyone? Pecan Street hits petabyte territory.
By Grant Fisher, chief information officer, Pecan Street We can say we collect 10 million records per-day, per-house. Or, we can say the database is many terabytes large. Or that we have the world's largest collection of energy, water, and gas data for use by academic researchers. However, it isn't until recently that I think Pecan Street has crossed into the “Big Data” realm.