Pecan street is located in Texas, three miles from downtown Austin. What’s so special about this street is that the smart grid is being built here. The Pecan Street project is an impressive test ground for smart homes, energy management and consumer electronics.
The project was initially launched at the University of Texas in February 2011. A number of noteworthy private partnerships with companies like Best Buy, Check-It, Chevrolet, Freescale, Intel, Landis+Gyr, Sony, SunEdison and Whirlpool were established to start the project. Every company is a stakeholder in this project because they have stakes in developing and testing this next-generation technology. Al of them want to help figure out new business models for advanced energy management systems.
The project is built on the 700-acres site of an old municipal airport. It’s supported by a $10.4 million Department of Energy grant and the private partners are investing another $14 million. The goal of this project is to deploy home energy management systems, supply electric vehicles and install rooftop PV systems to all the 400 residential homes and the select commercial buildings in this neighborhood smart grid.
Brewster McCracken, Executive Director of Pecan Street Inc., said that the project wants to help structure next generation energy systems by now focusing on consumers. Real people can gather data from these homes.
Included in the trial are some 60 Chevy Volts. This makes this project one of the nation’s highest residential concentrations of plug-in vehicles. More than 200 homes in this project are also equipped with rooftop solar panels for distributed generation. These electric cars and solar panels are designed to work in unison with smart appliances and home energy management systems so they can provide valuable insight for utilities.
McCracken said that it’s the right time when EV owners want to charge their vehicles and offering residences to go off the grid with solar generation. People entering in the trial are early adopters and innovators. It are all people that are interested in the latest technologies. So about 200 homes in the trial also have Nest thermostats, offering the stylish “first-learning thermostats” as a very good new energy product.
But McCracken admits that even with all these new technologies, we’re still in the early stage of understanding what the future holds for home energy management. Utilities have a hard time managing all the data that flows in and they still need to realize the full potential of smart grid capabilities.
Pecan Street Project will broaden out to 700 homes in the Austin area and 300 more in Dallas later this summer.
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