Building a Smarter Grid

I’m fortunate to live in Mueller, a vibrant, energy-conscious Austin, Texas neighborhood built on the site of the former municipal airport. Located only three miles from downtown, Mueller is the world’s largest LEED-ND certified community. LEED-ND is a U.S. Green Building Council rating system for neighborhood design that integrates the principles of smart growth, urbanism and green building. Because of Mueller’s unique central location and the generous footprint of the former airport, it offers a rare opportunity to build a smart community from scratch, right in the heart of the city.

Mueller is hosting an exciting $25 million smart grid demonstration. The effort is being organized and led by the Pecan Street Project, a research and development organization focused on transforming the way energy is produced, distributed, and consumed. The goal of the Mueller project is to “demonstrate and test technology and system improvements that reduces system demands and costs, increases energy efficiency, optimally allocates and matches demand and resources to meet that demand, and increases the reliability of the grid.”

Projects like this are vitally important to realizing the promise of smarter, cleaner energy. It in this real world setting, theory is put to the test. Research and planning provide the hypothesis, process and structure, but the actual act of “doing” is where we’ll learn the most.

During the course of the project, Pecan Street will test and study the following:

•  Distributed clean energy
•  Energy storage technologies
•  Smart grid water and smart grid irrigation systems
•  Smart appliances
•  Plug-in electric vehicles
•  Advanced meters and home energy management systems
•  Green building
•  New pricing models for electricity

Over the next five years, this demonstration will combine technologies and research from many different industry partners and hopes to involve up to 1,000 homes and 75 neighborhood businesses. Baseline data collection has already begun in a first test group of 100 homes.

The money for Pecan Street’s Mueller project started with a $10.4 million grant from the US Department of Energy. Spread over five years, that amount is tiny when compared to the 2011 national Energy budget of $28 billion (or the overall US budget of $1.4 trillion). I’m impressed by Pecan Street’s ambitious plans for these funds and hopeful for what we can learn. It’s exciting to be part of a smart investment in our future!

Energized is an ongoing series following my education about living a more sustainable life.

As Vice President of frog’s Design Realization group, Collin works closely with our design and engineering teams to bring innovative ideas to market. With over 20 years of experience in both creative and engineering management, Collin brings focus and multi-disciplinary expertise to this critical phase of the delivery process. In 1996, Collin co-founded frog’s digital media group and has worked extensively with frog clientele in the USA, Europe, and India.