HVAC

July 15, 2022

Pecan Street on KXAN: Why One Austin Neighborhood Tracks Energy Use Down to the Circuit

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Every light bulb, microwave and electric vehicle charger — tracked! That’s what around 300 homes are doing in the Mueller neighborhood in east Austin. They’re doing it as part of a research project called Pecan Street, and the data they’re collecting could reshape energy usage in the years to come.

July 14, 2022

During Texas’ Heatwave, Every Degree Matters. And so Do Conservation and Efficiency.

By Scott Hinson, chief technology officer, Pecan Street – For the second time in a week, Texas’ grid operator (ERCOT) and local utilities yesterday issued “calls for conservation” as the state bakes under a prolonged heatwave. Among the requests: increase your thermostat setpoint to 78 degrees to reduce state-wide air conditioner load. It’s unsurprising that air conditioning increases electricity demand during a heatwave. But it may surprise you to know just how powerful a driver it is and how close it can push the state toward a real problem.

Illustration of dataport dots
July 7, 2022

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.

June 22, 2022

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.

May 12, 2022

Cooling a Warming Planet:  What Homes in Texas and New York Can Teach Us About Cooling Demand Around the Globe

By Cavan Merski, data analyst, Pecan Street – We were interested to see how our homes in these two regions compared now and what will happen in the future as climate change brings warmer summers to most of the country, so we performed a series of regressions to explore differences in the cooling load between homes in Austin, TX homes and Ithaca, NY.

March 11, 2022

First Look at High-Resolution Home Energy Data in Puerto Rico Suggests Vastly Different Challenges and Opportunities.

By Cavan Merski, data analyst, Pecan Street – The first Pecan Street home in Puerto Rico is online, and we already see some differences compared to the hundreds of homes in our network in Texas, New York, California and Colorado.

February 24, 2022

A Tale of Two February Freezes – Can Last Year’s Grid Failure and This Month’s Storm be Compared?

By Scott Hinson, chief technology officer, Pecan Street – The recent freeze gave us an opportunity to compare electricity use in our research network before and during the event to how people used power during last year’s crisis. Did they learn any tips or tricks? Did they panic heat their homes to prepare for power outages? Did they charge their cars any differently? Here's what we saw.

October 27, 2020

Pecan Street Joins Eaton Team to Improve Grid Reliability with Renewables

(October 2, 2020 — AUSTIN, TX) Eaton Corporation has convened a team of researchers, including Pecan Street Inc., to develop a next-generation grid services solution to improve the overall efficiency of the electric grid and to optimize renewable energy generation.

May 15, 2020

COVID-19 is Changing Residential Electricity Demand

By Scott Hinson, chief technology officer, Pecan Street - As the patterns of our lives shift in response to COVID-19, we decided to take a look at how our research participants’ energy profiles have changed. Not surprisingly, they’re using more energy. But how much, and for what?

November 22, 2019

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.

Newer

Page 2 from 3

Older

stay up to date

Newsletter Signup

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.