By Cavan Merski, data analyst, Pecan Street – Our expansion into Puerto Rico is unique; nowhere else on Earth can you find the island’s combination of energy challenges and energy ambition.
Cavan Merski

Cavan Merski is Pecan Street Inc.’s data analyst. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Pecan Street conducts groundbreaking data research, product testing and policy analysis that accelerate the development and deployment of innovative climate and conservation solutions.
Energy Efficiency Does More Than Save Money and Reduce Emissions. It Can Strengthen the Grid.
By Cavan Merski – Energy-efficient homes provide a variety of benefits to customers and the grid. But energy efficiency can be leveraged to produce even more bang for its buck by enabling certain types of demand response.
Heat Pumps 101: Understanding the Technology That Will Drive Residential Decarbonization
By Cavan Merski When you spend your day surrounded by co-workers, you can forget that not everyone knows the same stuff you do. That’s especially true in areas that intersect at Pecan Street, like energy and data. I was reminded of this recently when talking with friends about some of the incentives included in the […]
Pecan Street’s JupyterHub Can Help Rapidly Scale and Iterate Your Research
By Cavan Merski, data analyst, Pecan Street – To allow better access and more sophisticated analysis of this data, we launched our own Jupyterhub, a multi-user server for Jupyter Notebooks designed to support large-scale analysis by using GPU and memory based on a server rather than a local machine. It also allows multiple users – like groups of students or researchers – to share the same document at the same time.
More Clean Power in Texas will Require More Grid Transmission and DER Development
By Cavan Merski, data analyst, Pecan Street – The ERCOT power grid is back in the news. Texas experienced its hottest May on record and June has seen consistent record-breaking temperatures as well. ERCOT has been busy trying to balance extremely high grid demand with various electric generation plant outages. On June 12, ERCOT recorded its highest ever grid demand of over 75GW. That record only lasted one week before grid demand climbed to more than 76 GW on June 20. And we’re wasting emission-free wind and solar power.