Building a smarter grid in Austin, Texas

The Mueller neighborhood in Austin, TX, doesn’t look like the site of a revolution.

The development, rising on the site of Austin’s old airport, is designed to look and feel like a traditional small town. It’s the sort of place where neighbors call to each other from their porches in the evening, while their kids race from house to house along the sidewalks. Eventually, some 10,000 people will live there.

But behind that domestic façade, Mueller is ground zero for the Pecan Street, an initiative developed by the City of Austin in collaboration with EDF, Austin Energy and the University of Texas to reinvent the way electricity is generated and used.

The neighborhood is a living laboratory of ideas and technologies that will move the nation’s $1.3 trillion electricity market toward a future in which energy is cheap, abundant and clean.

EDF helped make the vision a reality

"We are going to revolutionize how energy is produced, transported and consumed in America, " says Brewster McCracken, Pecan Street’s executive director.

The initiative began in 2008 when McCracken, a City Councilman, met with representatives from Austin Energy (the local utility), the Chamber of Commerce and the University of Texas to discuss Austin’s energy future.

Mueller residents know the entire community shares the benefits of a smarter grid.

Credit: Julia Robinson

Gradually, the group realized that it wasn’t enough just to produce local clean energy — you also had to distribute and manage it through an interactive system, like the Internet. And the old electrical grid wouldn’t work. They also needed help in turning their ideas into reality.

In the summer of 2008, McCracken approached Jim Marston, our Texas regional director, about joining the project. The formal goal was to support clean energy and spur local job creation, but the vision was more ambitious.

To help get the project off the ground, we:

• brought in leading technology companies like Cisco, GE, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.
• helped win a five-year, $10.4 million stimulus grant from the Department of Energy, matched by $15 million in local contributions.
• established ambitious environmental goals, which include reducing carbon emissions by 64% compared to an average Austin neighborhood. Houses equipped with solar panels will consume no more energy than they produce, achieving zero net carbon emissions.

“Suddenly it’s a $30 million project,” says UT’s Webber. “Now it’s real, and we all felt that having EDF on board early on was an important accelerator for us.”

We needed to bring in an honest broker, someone everybody trusted, who cared about the environment and was capable of getting things done.

In Austin, that’s Jim Marston and EDF.

Michael Webber Professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas and one of Pecan Street’s founding members

New technology for a smart, green grid

Mueller is the setting in which the Pecan Street group will test different ways a so-called “smart grid” can function. With this new kind of electrical grid, “all the devices in your house will work as a whole to find the most efficient and inexpensive ways to use energy,” says Miriam Horn, director of EDF’s smart grid initiative.

This is not fantasy; corporations and entrepreneurs are already working on the hardware and software needed to knit our homes into energy management systems that communicate with us and the grid.

We included strict environmental goals in Pecan Street's "request for information" (RFI), inviting companies to design integrated home energy systems for deployment in Mueller. Sony, Best Buy and others were among the roughly two dozen companies to submit proposals in response.

In February 2011, Pecan Street installed its first piece of technology: wireless energy monitors in the homes of 100 volunteers. The monitors, designed by Incenergy, an Austin start-up, measure exactly where, when and in what amounts energy is consumed in each home.

Incenergy’s Barry McConachie, showing company software that tracks household energy usage.

Credit: Julia Robinson

The information can be displayed on smart phones in real time, says Shane Mericle, Incencergy’s chief operating officer. “You can see when clothes dryers, air conditioners, microwaves or refrigerators are running. You can even see when someone turns on a light and how efficient that bulb is.”

Data from the energy monitors will be collected and analyzed by EDF and University of Texas experts with help from the UT supercomputer center. It will help guide the choice, from the competing RFI proposals, of companies to install smart appliances and plug-in electric vehicles in Mueller homes.

In a typical smart grid home, appliances will talk to each other and to the grid, which will be constantly adapting to changes in supply and demand. You will be able to program your dryer, say, to run when energy is cheap, or when the energy source is renewable.

“When I can see how much the electricity costs when I fire up the big-screen TV or the air conditioning — that’s going to change my habits,” says Dennis Mick, a Mueller resident.

Rooftop solar electric panels might monitor the morning weather report to calculate how much energy they’ll produce that day, then set up a schedule for how it will be used or sold back to the grid at peak demand times. All this will help the grid meet demand spikes without cranking up a fossil-fuel plant.

"People will actively manage their energy use more and more," says UT’s Michael Webber. "We'll choose what we use, when we use it and how much we use. The Mueller folks really buy into that big picture,” he adds. “They get that if we do this as a community we will benefit and then the world as a whole will benefit.”

Bringing pilot projects to scale — and getting the rules right

We are helping develop smart grid deployments in Charlotte, San Diego and other U.S. cities, using what we learn on the ground to guide our advocacy with federal and state regulators: getting the rules in place to open up electricity markets to new clean resources and reward utilities for delivering significant pollution reductions.

• In California, we helped shape the Public Utilities Commission's rules for smart grid investments by the state's investor-owned utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric — to ensure they deliver maximum consumer and environmental benefits. Read about the grid project in Borrego Springs, CA »


• In Charlotte, NC, we are working with Duke Energy on its Clinton Global Initiative commitment, Envision Charlotte, to use smart grid technologies to reduce energy use in downtown commercial buildings 20% within five years, avoiding 220,000 tons of greenhouse gases by 2016.


• In Illinois, we're working with a leading consumer advocacy group — the Citizens' Utility Board — to shape legislation authorizing the state’s largest electric utility, Commonwealth Edison, to spend more than $1 billion over the next ten years on smart grid electric system upgrades: including clear environmental performance targets and linking the utility's return on investment to delivery on those targets.