Pecan Street Posts
New Pecan Street Annual Report
By Suzanne Russo, CEO, Pecan Street - Our special edition annual report shares highlights from our first 10 years and recaps activities from the past fiscal year (FY 2018-19). The Pecan Street team had a lot of fun thinking back on everything we’ve accomplished so far — I hope you enjoy reading about these projects as much as we enjoyed working on them.
Pecan Street Welcomes 9 Companies to PLATFORM Program
By Bart Bohn and Elisa Gilson, Pecan Street – Pecan Street has filled its second cohort of companies participating in its PLATFORM for Product Launch program. Let's meet them!
Pecan Street Launches Free AI Solar Monitoring Service for Research Participants
By Esha Choudhary, database administrator, Pecan Street – Whether you’re trying to reduce your home’s use of fossil fuel electricity or simply want to unplug from the grid, knowing how well your rooftop solar system is performing is an important part of maximizing your investment. Few people want to monitor their system every day, so Pecan Street is piloting a service we developed that alerts users when their PV systems “underperform.”
Pecan Street Releases Step-By-Step Toolkit for Foundations to Invest in Cleantech
By Bart Bohn and Elisa Gilson, Pecan Street – Pecan Street has released a step-by-step guide for foundation staff to implement a PRI strategy. The toolkit includes an overview of PRIs, the cleantech field, ways to convince your board of cleantech’s connection to your mission, and the best way to structure PRIs for your institution.
Upcoming Events and Conferences
Heading to a conference or industry event? See if a Pecan Street staff member is on the agenda. Each month, we will update the public events at which our staff will appear.
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.
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.
Pecan Street @ 10: Tackling Energy Justice Through Representative Research Datasets
By Suzanne Russo, CEO, Pecan Street – In some ways, our volunteers are a varied bunch. But there are few things that connect most of our participants and, in fact, most “early adopter” market segments. They’re mostly homeowners. They’re mostly mid- to upper-income. They already know a good deal about energy, their energy bill, and the cost of renewable energy options. In other words, they’re not the “average energy customer.”
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.
Pecan Street @ 10: An Innovation Lab in the Heart of Texas’ Innovation Capital
By Scott Hinson, CTO, Pecan Street – We need our electricity generation, use, and storage to be smarter, better connected, and more efficient. Thanks to what we’ve built over the last 10 years, these are the kinds of advances we are able to accelerate at Pecan Street’s lab.
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: A Real-World Plug and Play Test Bed for Innovators Around the World
By Scott Hinson, chief technology officer, Pecan Street - Over the past 10 years, we’ve worked with global brands you’ve heard of and startups you haven't on products ranging from HVAC load management hardware to electric vehicle charging to home automation.
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.
Pecan Street @ 10: Creating an Army of Citizen Scientists, One Soldier at a Time
By Rachel Jenkins, director of operations, Pecan Street Calling Dan McAtee an enthusiastic participant in Pecan Street’s research is a massive understatement. Not only does Dan volunteer for nearly every research project we announce, he makes suggestions about what we should research next. He’s a one man focus group.
Pecan Street PLATFORM Participant SAYA Lands New Customer
By Bart Bohn, startup advisor, Pecan Street Congratulations to SAYA, a provider of a smart water meter for residential and commercial buildings, on the recent announcement of securing installations in 500 homes in The Heights community in Chino, California.
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.
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.
Pecan Street’s high-resolution data is unlocking grid mysteries
By Suzanne Russo, CEO, Pecan Street Clean electricity is booming. Last year in California, solar power plants generated nearly 12% of the state's total electricity production and distributed solar likely produced another 5%. Texas got 18% of its electricity from wind and solar. In many markets, unsubsidized clean energy costs the same or less than conventional fossil-fuel powered plants. And the cost of clean, renewable electricity continues to fall.
Better late than never, right?
By Suzanne Russo, CEO, Pecan Street You know those friends you haven’t seen in a while…the ones that you KNOW have been busy trying to change the world, but haven’t bothered blogging about it? That’s us.
Pecan Street Inc. Brings Energy Research to Upstate New York and California’s Bay Area
(AUSTIN, TX – August 1, 2018) – A $1.1 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will allow Pecan Street Inc. to expand its groundbreaking home energy research network into New York and California. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Cornell University’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University, and […]
Restarting Homeplug
Your eGauge energy data collection system reports data back to Pecan Street’s servers using Power Line Communication (PLC), where the data collected by the eGauge is transmitted through your power lines to a device called the Homeplug. The Homeplug retrieves that data from the wall outlet and sends it to your router/modem via ethernet cable, […]