Pecan Street CEO shows Smart Grid Today unrivaled new laboratory

3-story facility, hundreds of homes ready to test gear -- An exclusive interview from Smart Grid Today
 
ROCKVILLE, Md. - May 14, 2013 - PRLog -- Pecan Streets CEO Brewster McCracken gave Smart Grid Today, the leading independent, daily, professional news journal of the smart grid industry, a tour of the Pike Powers Laboratory & Center for Commercialization in Austin, Texas. The exclusive interview was of such value to the industry that Smart Grid Todaypublisher Modern Markets Intelligence, Inc., is sharing it with the electricity industry free of charge.

The story has been slightly edited for this format and is included below and at smartgridtoday.com/pecanstreet0513 (http://www.smartgridtoday.com/pecanstreet0513).

Test equipment from Dell systems, National Instruments and Schneider is arriving at Pecan Street Inc's new lab, the Pike Powers Laboratory & Center for Commercialization. The organization is bringing to life "the only testing facility in the United States that can do verification of disaggregation algorithms," Pecan Street CEO Brewster McCracken told us during a recent visit to the housing development where the lab is situated, in Austin, Texas.

Those systems, from firms such as Bidgely and Onzo, purport to take whole-meter data and figure out what each appliance is doing -- and now they will have a place to prove it works, he added. They can use the hard reads on individual circuits from Pecan Street's direct-load measurement systems installed at circuit panels in research participant homes, McCracken said.

This will let them test and improve the accuracy of their algorithms and other control systems, McCracken said. They will know if an AC or pool pump is the culprit on a higher-than-expected bill.

"We have hundreds of homes and by the summer, nearly 1,000 that are measuring the electric KWH and voltage and apparent power of up to 24 circuits plus the whole home, in 1-second and 1-minute intervals," he added. "This is the only place in the country, to our knowledge, where that kind of independent testing can be performed and verified and used to actually improve the performance of these algorithms."

There is a great deal of potential for disaggregation approaches in "measuring individual major loads for things like nonintrusive load monitoring and for isolating out, for home maintenance purposes, individual systems," McCracken said. "But the state of nonintrusive load monitoring disaggregation is still pretty early."

Based at the University of Texas, Pecan Street is used to disruptive innovation, having developed a course focused on developing disruptive innovation to create new markets and set the smart grid and clean tech industries in motion (SGT, 11-Aug-22 (http://www.smartgridtoday.com/articles/in-austin-talk-abo...)).

Nonintrusive load monitoring is "one of the holy grails, for instance, in the air-conditioning and appliance industry where high-resolution electricity use measurements could be used to detect and report maintenance issues in a manner similar to a 'check engine light'," he added.

What did they learn so far?

Pecan Street researchers found current transformer (CT), collar-based systems to be the most accurate method for measuring individual circuits, but the component and installation costs of these systems will need to come down -- or the commercial applications made possible by them will need to expand beyond energy management for them to catch on in the residential market, McCracken said.

If that sort of system as a matter of course gets installed at the time that an AC compressor or a solar panel is installed, "that is a potential way that market evolution could occur," McCracken said. "The other possible model involves a system incorporating a gateway device that can pair with the meter to get higher resolution of electric use data and an algorithm that analyzes and disaggregates the data.

"For gateway devices to gain traction, installing a gateway and pairing it with a smart meter will likely need to become as simple as installing a WiFi router," he added.

New lab is big

The three-floor, Pike Powers Laboratory & Center for Commercialization in Austin has 12 times the natural gas flow rate of single-family homes. It has four times the electrical service, or 800 amps. "We have 35 KWHs of electric storage on site," McCracken said.

Researchers at the new lab will be working on methods for modulating power use of specific products such as EVs, in response to pricing and grid condition signals delivered over the internet and utility power meters (SGT, Mar-20 (http://www.smartgridtoday.com/articles/9189-pecan-street-...)).

Each of the three floors "is independently controllable down to the plug and circuit level," he noted. "That is meaningful, for example, if a company wants to test the ability of operating one of the floors as a simulated small commercial entity and then modulate electric levels and the actual performance of specific appliances -- or find out whether meters can communicate with gateway systems using different iterations of a smart-energy profile or different gateway systems or different wireless networks.

"Anything of that nature can be tested here independently."

Two-car garage is lab, too

The garage, where McCracken was charging his Volt the day he visited with us, has room for two EVs and Schneider EVLink EV chargers. "From a product-testing-capabilities level, the garage itself is actually an independent testing facility," he noted.

"There are four separate testing facilities within this laboratory and center that can operate independently or in an integrated fashion. This is to have a lot of the dedicated testing capabilities when it comes to things like … natural gas-fuel charging an electric car and battery control systems."

The new lab is in the Mueller neighborhood of Austin where an ambitious effort to redevelop Robert Mueller Municipal Airport into a mixed-use urban village in the heart of the city has helped Austin chart new directions, the MuellerAustin.com website said.

Why do it in Mueller?

Mueller is envisioned as a sustainable community that is meeting extensive goals in housing and ...

Please visit http://www.smartgridtoday.com/pecanstreet0513 to read the full story.

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