Press Releases, News & Technical Documents
Insights from Pecan Street’s residential water use research
For the past year, Pecan Street has been working with volunteer participants to carry out data-intensive research on how households use water and to better understand the water demands of day-to-day activities. You can download a PDF of a recent presentation of initial findings.
Pecan Street Opens Waitlist for Residential Microgrid System
Pecan Street is conducting screenings with homeowners that would like to acquire the Energy Switch – a microgrid in a box.
Atlantic CityLab: Microgrids Might Be Ready for the Big City
They also took data from a Pecan Street research project, a dataset of homes generating their own solar power. By merging these two samples, the scientists modeled what the city would look like with different levels of rooftop solar production.
IoT and Big Data: The Dichotomy between Too Much and Too Little
McCracken and his team built Dataport, the world’s largest source of disaggregated customer energy data for university researchers around the world. “We’ve taken a consumer-grade data measurement tool for solar panels, and are using it to operate the world’s largest research database on customer energy use,” he says.
Press Release: Concurrent Design, Inc. and Pecan Street Receive DOE SunShot Initiative Grant for Smart Energy Switch
Pecan Street has already developed and successfully tested the concept in its Pike Powers Lab in Austin. The SunShot award will allow Concurrent Design and Pecan Street to produce and test a more advanced prototype that demonstrates full commercial capability and can serve as a reference design for a new category of residential energy products.
University Municipal Water Consortium Bi-Annual Conference Agenda
Could smart water meters one day be the norm in Austin?
With the “BluCube” developed by Pecan Street, there’s no need to change out the whole meter. Instead, a new register, with a plug for a transmitter that would send signals to the cube in the customer’s home, is placed on top of the existing meter body. And Pecan Street is working on an even simpler solution: a ring that could fit around any register and links up to a transmitter.
KVUE – Austin neighborhood helping with clean energy research
TxTrib: Researchers, Water Providers Launch Conservation Effort
With a third of Texans still facing drought conditions, a coalition of Texas universities and water providers has launched an $8 million effort to curb water use in cities.