The City of Austin, Texas has launched the Pecan Street Project, a  clean energy public/private research and development consortium. The goal: to transform the city into a showcase, next-generation smart energy grid using leading-edge technologies and distribution systems. Partners include the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and a host of big-name corporations, including Dell, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft.

More specifically, the project's aim, according to spokesman Colin Rowan, is to "develop one power plant worth of new energy through renewable energy sources within the city limits." It's an ambitious and visionary goal—and a vague one. At this point it's not completely clear how the city will get from here to there; there's not a clear road map.

This is why all that non-profit and corporate talent was brought in—to do the creative work that will fill in the blanks of the Big Vision. Over the years, EDF has developed an excellent reputation through successful eco-partnerships with corporations like McDonald's, FedEx and Dupont. This reputation, says Rowan, is one of the reasons the city fathers reached out to EDF to provide technical guidance and liaise with the project's corporate partners.

The next nine months will be spent honing in on critical issues and developing a plan. There are infrastructure, technology, and policy matters to address, and there is also a business-model challenge: the city's home-grown, multi-point power plant must be economically sustainable. It's one thing for a utility to know how to make money when it sends electricity down a pipeline and charges for its usage. It's quite another to know how to stay in business when it's your customers who are generating the product. This would be a critical issue in any event, and it cuts especially close to the bone in this instance because Austin's energy utility, Austin Energy, is city-owned: its councilmen are the utility's Board of Directors.

Once the preliminary report has been issued, the city will open its grid to companies so that they can, in Rowan's words, "beta-test the technologies that will be needed to fulfill these recommendations." This is where all those corporate partners come in: they have the know-how to create what a Pecan Street Project press release calls the "Energy System of the Future."

It's an exciting vision. "We aren't just going to build a lab," another press release declares. "The City of Austin will be the lab."

It will be an experiment in service to the planet. "Austin intends to share with cities across America and around the world," another press release declares. "This project will help cities map out the creation of the infrastructure it will take to power their economies and preserve the environment."

It's not just a smart-grid project; it's also a business-development initiative. "We're hoping this will be a start-up magnet," says Rowan. "We think entrepreneurs and investors will want to test their product on a real-life grid."

If things pan out as planned, the city's grid will eventually be more than a lab: it will also be a successful, leading-edge smart grid. The long-term vision includes net metering, which enables customers using clean technology like solar to sell energy back to the grid, and more, such as real-time dashboards that let consumers monitor and control their energy use.

Imagine YouTube transported to the world of energy, with individual households and businesses producing energy instead of videos, and the community as a whole co-creating the content (in this case, energy), which is distributed via the interconnecting system. This is the smart grid of the future, which Austin is taking a leadership position in creating.

The city is in an unusually strong and perhaps unique position to do so. It already has the nation's largest green power program of any utility, and there are no "utility cooperation" issues because Austin Energy is city-owned. The University of Texas, including its Austin Clean Energy Incubator, has its main campus in the city and is a major source of research and commercialization. Austin also has strong semiconductor and software research bases and is a hub of advanced computing. Finally, clean tech enjoys strong citizen support.

Mayor Will Wynn (yes, that's his real name) has committed to a goal of 100 MW of solar energy and 30% renewable energy by 2020. The Pecan Street Project is the city's next step as it travels on the road of making those goals a reality.

As for the project's unlikely name, it comes from Austin's legendary Sixth Street, the city's music and entertainment hub. The connection? It seems that Pecan Street was the name of the street before it got a number. "All the literal names were flawed," says Rowan. "We were looking for an awesome iconic name."

In a way, the name is fitting. Sixth Street is all about the music, and there's a musical something about the Pecan Street Project, too. We need a celebratory boldness to address our energy and climate-change changes--and the jazz of improvisational creativity, too. The Pecan Street Project delivers both these things, in spades.