Austin Energy, a municipally owned and operated utility that serves the City of Austin, Texas, is nearing completion of transforming the city’s energy consumption and delivery system into a smart grid. Once complete, the Pecan Street Project will make Austin the second city in the US to implement a smart grid after Boulder, Colo.

The project includes building a new data center to process the huge amount of information bound to be transported from each customer’s smart meter to the utility and back.

The utility’s General Manager Roger Duncan has been a pivotal figure in implementation of the Pecan Street Project. DatacenterDynamics FOCUS interviewed Duncan about Austin Energy’s relationship with the city’s data centers and the possible effects of Project Pecan on them.

While the amount of data centers in Austin is relatively small, the efficiency-conscious utility allocates anywhere between $500,000 and $1 million per year for rebates to data center operators that implement solutions that help them use energy more efficiently.

DatacenterDynamics FOCUS: What is Austin Energy’s service area and what is the utility’s data center client base like?

Roger Duncan: Our service area is about 459 square miles. It’s basically the City of Austin and some territory to the west of Austin. We don’t have a large number of data centers in Austin but they are of course significant loads. Several years ago (we started) looking at the special energy efficiency requirements for data centers and developed a special set of rebates and incentives for data center owners when they come to Austin.

DCDF: Tell us about Austin Energy’s own new data center project.

RD: We’re building a whole new energy control system building. Part of that will be upgraded to what’s called Level 3 requirements for our data center. The new smart grid (infrastructure and services) that we’re putting in place, ranging from mobile workforce to automated metering infrastructure is requiring expansion of our data center operations.

DCDF: What is Austin Energy’s generation fuel portfolio?

RD: About 32 percent coal; 25 percent nuclear and about another 30 percent or less of gas. This year we expect to (generate) about 12 percent of our portfolio from renewable energy – mainly wind.

DCDF: Will the smart grid have an impact on data centers in Austin?

RD: We already had in place – as of two years ago – special operations for data center energy efficiency, dealing with the building envelope, heating and cooling requirements, which is the major energy consumption of data centers. The Pecan Street Project (name of the smart grid project) is dealing more with the connectivity and smart grid operations for residential and commercial operations.

Not specifically data centers. I don’t see any particular impact on them. We’re already focusing special requirements of our system to make sure they have the reliability that they need … and the back-up. I don’t think smart grid will be changing that.

DCDF: What is the scope and timeline of the Pecan Street Project?

RD: All of our customers will have automated metering infrastructure in place – 100 percent smart meters by the end of (October).

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