Pecan Street Smart Grid Demonstration Project

Headquartered at The University of Texas at Austin, Pecan Street Inc. is a research and development organization focused on developing and testing advanced technology, business model and customer behavior surrounding advanced energy management systems. Simply put, we’re helping reinvent America’s electric system.

Our flagship effort is the Pecan Street Demonstration, a smart grid research project in Austin’s Mueller community.

The initiative began in 2008 as a community collaboration to spark the nascent “smart grid” market in Austin the way that the MCC and SEMATECH consortia sparked the region’s semiconductor and information technology sectors a generation ago.

Representatives of the founding members – the City of Austin, Austin Energy, The University of Texas, the Austin Technology Incubator, the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce and Environmental Defense Fund – enlisted the participation of nearly a dozen private companies to explore the technical, economic and policy implications of an energy system that relies on better energy efficiency, locally generated renewable energy and a new economic model for electricity utilities.