Residential heat pump installations are poised to rapidly accelerate over the next decade as part of the effort to electrify homes and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As of 2020, only 14% of America’s 124 million housing units used heat pumps for space heating. To help households make sense of this technology and understand system […]
Cooling a Warming Planet: What Homes in Texas and New York Can Teach Us About Cooling Demand Around the Globe
Pecan Street draws on our network of volunteer research participants to examine cooling loads in different parts of the United States. Our data show that cooling loads differ based on location, building characteristics, cooling systems, and human behavior. Understanding how these factors interact will be crucial to managing cooling load growth over the next […]
Untapped in Texas: How Solar, EVs and Demand Response Could Fortify the Grid
Texans will never forget February 2021. Winter Storm Uri crippled the state’s natural gas supply and sparked a cascading failure of our electricity system. More than 4 million homes and businesses lost power, many of them for days. More than 700 people died. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimated the electricity crisis cost […]
Using Big Data to Maximize Microgrid Performance
The concept of microgrids is simple. Designing a microgrid to meet a variety of potential goals and to deliver power during emergencies is more complicated. Based on Pecan Street’s analysis of the high-resolution data from our research network, this paper examines how high-frequency circuit-level electricity data produced by Pecan Street’s residential energy network can help […]
Distributed Energy Toolkit for Historically Black Colleges & Universities
Microgrids powered by clean, distributed energy resources (DERs) that supply continuous power during grid outages, can increase grid resiliency and security, and provide economic and environmental benefits to HBCUs by allowing participation in utility savings programs that reduce overall energy use and dependence on fossil fuel energy resources. Pecan Street developed this toolkit to […]
