Power Angels

By This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it | Friday, November 4, 2011, 08:45 AM

An Austin company said today it wants to build a major computer data center powered by renewable energy near Pflugerville.

The company, WindData, plans to build the data centers. It is owned by another Austin company, Baryonyx Corp., which has several wind power projects in Texas, said plans to build a $70 million data center within the next three years that eventually would become part of a five-building data center campus and involve $210 million in investment.

The project would employ about 30 people in its first phase and eventually have 150 jobs, the company said.

Baryonyx is working with the Pflugerville Community Development Corp. and is seeking incentives both from Travis and Williamson counties.

“With our focus on the renewable energy industry, it is very appropriate that Pflugerville’s first data center will be powered by 100 percent green energy,” said Floyd Akers, executive director of the development corporation. “In addition to a number of high-paying jobs, we will also have a dramatic amount of construction at this (data center) location during the next 10 years.”

Company CEO Ian Hatton said Baryonyx likes Pflugerville’s proximity to Austin and its location in a deregulated energy market. “We hope to finalize tax assistance agreements with both Williamson and Travis counties to be able to proceed with the final build,” Hatton said in a statement.

The company is using Angelou Economics as a consultant on site selection. “From the very beginning of the site-selection process, (Plugerville) proved to be a very reliable partner by exhibiting the necessary aggressiveness to recruit my client,” said Angelos Angelou, chief executive of Angelou Economics. “WindData will bring high-paying jobs and several hundred million dollars of investment to the community. The company will also strengthen the city’s ability to recruit more data centers and eleveate Pfugerville’s renewable energy status.”

Smart.Clean.Energy: January 9-13 2012

Pecan Street Inc., the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) and the Webber Energy Group will host a weeklong course on entrepreneurship and business development in the clean energy and smart grid sectors at the Commons Learning Center at the University of Texas at Austin’s JJ Pickle Research Campus.

The Smart.Clean.Energy. course is offered in two sessions, or short courses:

1. Energy Technology and Policy short course: 8:30 a.m. Monday, January 9, 2012 to 5 p.m. Wednesday, January 11, 2012.

2. Commercializing Energy Innovations short course: 8:30 a.m. Thursday, January 12, 2012 to 12 p.m. Friday January 13, 2012.

Smart Grid News • October 13, 2011

By Liz Enbysk, Smart Grid News Managing Editor

It’s been more than a year since we checked in on the Pecan Street Project, Austin’s community-scale testing ground for smart grid technologies. At the time we got an inside look at plans and next steps.

Fast forward to fall 2011 and those plans are clearly taking shape. Pecan Street Inc. recently announced some big-name companies it will be working with on a consumer-focused smart grid built around home applications and consumer electronics – Sony, Intel, Whirlpool, Chevrolet, Landis+Gyr and Best Buy among them.

“To be relevant, smart grid innovations must solve consumers’ problems and provide services that excite them,” said Pecan Street Inc. executive director Brewster McCracken.  “We are thrilled to have these forward-thinking companies working with our researchers and with the hundreds of residents who are volunteering their homes and their time.”

We’ve said before that what the smart grid needs is a dose of Disney-style magic to engage consumers. It appears from the list of consumer giants signing on to this Pecan Street initiative that we may finally see some razzle-dazzle. Here are a couple examples of what’s on tap for Pecan Street’s volunteers:

09.29.2011 By Rich Barlow. Video by Nicolae Ciorogan

Nathan Phillips is a meter-reader for the 21st century.

The College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of geography and environment recently piled into a Nissan Murano with collaborators Bob Ackley and Eric Crosson and rambled through the streets of greater Boston to hunt for natural gas leaks. With the help of a strange-looking vacuum device attached to the car just below the rear bumper, the three have found geysers of gas gushing invisibly from underground pipes corroded by age. The leaks, Phillips says, contribute to global warming, could create explosions in some extreme cases, have killed or damaged up to 10,000 trees in Massachusetts (a disputed matter under litigation), and shaft rate-paying gas customers who must pick up the tab for wasted gas.

The vacuum sniffs up molecules into a suitcase-sized machine in the hatch called a cavity ringdown analyzer, where a laser beam ricochets off mirrors and through the collected particles. The more natural gas collected, the more the laser diminishes. When the machine detects a leak, numerical values on a display screen indicate how much gas is spurting; if there are multiple leaks, the display “looks like a stock market index during a busy day,” says Phillips. The machine instantly spits out the leaks’ locations and shows them on Google Earth maps as shafts of green, punching skyward like a light show.

The Google Earth image above shows shafts of bright green indicating natural gas leaking around BU's Charles River Campus. If there are multiple leaks, the display “looks like a stock market index during a busy day,” says Nathan Phillips. Photo courtesy of Nathan Phillips and Picarro, Inc.