Pecan Street, Inc.
To improve researcher access to critical energy data by enhancing data resolution and granularity, diversifying data linkages, and expanding geographic scope of instrumented homes
Pecan Street is an independent nonprofit organization that is a leading provider of high-resolution residential energy use data to the research community. Through its testbed of volunteer instrumented homes, Pecan Street is able to collect disaggregated circuit-level energy use information at 15-minute, 1-minute, and, increasingly, 1-second intervals. This unique data set is then provided free of charge to the academic community, helping facilitate research known as nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM), which allows scholars to disaggregate household-level energy use based on the unique power “signature” of each monitored appliance. Funds from this grant will allow Pecan Street to expand their data collection efforts through three interrelated projects. First, they will increase the number of homes within their existing test-bed in Austin, Texas that collect energy use data at 1-second intervals. Second, they will integrate additional data from Independent System Operators (or ISOs) around the country—information such as wholesale market pricing, forecasting, and generation information—that enriches the energy use data collected from the Pecan Street testbed. Third, Pecan Street will expand the number of instrumented homes in its network, adding in 100 additional homes in both upstate New York and the Bay Area of California.