SOLAR TODAY Blog

By Charlie Angelo
SOLAR TODAY Intern

Team Germany, represented by Technische Universitat Darmstadt, placed first in the U.S. Department of Energy 2009 Solar Decathlon. Team Germany leap-frogged Illinois and Team California with a perfect score of 150 in the decathlon's final event, the net metering contest. The win is the second straight for Team Germany, who came out on top of the 2007 Solar Decathlon as well.

 

WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Department of Energy – There’s a new contest this year at the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, and it may help show the way for homeowners to turn back the costs of their electric bills.

The Net Metering contest adds an entirely new dimension to the challenge, as homes are connected to a grid to measure how well they produce or consume power.

“In today’s sophisticated energy grid, houses that use solar power can feed energy back into the power grid, eliminating the need for costly battery storage systems,” said Richard King, director of the Solar Decathlon, who is with the Energy Department. “Imagine receiving a zero bill for electricity. These Solar Decathlon homes are showing us the way today.”

By Chris Stimpson
Executive Campaigner
Solar Nation

 

Andy and Pam Cudahy: "We've been interested in the potential of solar power since the oil crisis of 1974, and (the Solar Decathlon) is a great place to come and see how far it's progressed.

"We're recent retirees, and we're planning to move down to Charlotte, North Carolina. If we can, we'll build something new there, and try to include a lot of what we've seen today in it. Mainly, that would be the passive design stuff -- overhangs, serious insulation, advanced windows, etc. But on the active side, we could probably manage solar hot water; PV might have to wait for better pricing or better incentives."

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Team California took the early lead today in the 2009 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon by winning the Architectural contest.  The Solar Decathlon, an international design competition held on the National Mall, challenges university-led teams to design, build and operate the most attractive, functional, and energy efficient solar-powered homes.  This is the fourth time DOE has held the competition since 2002.

Team California moved up to first place today from third place by winning the Architecture contest with a score of 98 points and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette's "Cajun-style" home, built to withstand dramatic weather, won Market Viability with a score of 97 points.  Both contests were announced today and were worth a possible 100 points.

Architectural Juror Jonathan Knowles, from Rhode Island School of Design, said Team California's creation of microclimates in the home went well beyond expectations of competition rules and that the home broke out of the box in aesthetic appeal.

"Team California created a solar home with a beautiful design in every respect, incorporating a crystal-clear concept that successfully translates a regional architecture to Washington, D.C.," Knowles said.  "The interior and exterior appears as one."

By Chris Stimpson
Executive Campaigner
Solar Nation

Oct 11: The more I see of the houses in the Solar Decathlon, the more I realize that this is not a competition with a level playing field. Or to put it another way, every one of the twenty entries makes such a unique and independent contribution to the further deployment of solar power that they could be considered winners even before the judging starts.

Today I spent some time with David Siguenza of the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, learning about the unusual structure that is Team Spain's entry in the event. One of the first buildings a visitor sees after emerging from the Smithsonian Metro station, the 'Black and White House' appears as a flattened cube wearing a house-size mortar board at a jaunty angle.

The 'mortar board' is really an inverted pyramid pivoting on a ball-and-socket joint a couple of feet above the house's flat roof, with a PV array covering its entire upper surface. Nine times a day the pyramid moves to align itself with the sun's changing position, so as to maximize the efficiency of the panels' monocrystalline cells. It's a perilous-looking arrangement, one that's easy to visualize taking off in a high wind like the farmhouse in 'The Wizard of Oz', but that contingency has been considered by the designers. The structure is stressed to accommodate winds up to 120 mph, and at 90 mph it automatically levels itself and is secured by hydraulic jacks.



The walls of the Black and White House also contribute to its electrical output. Floor-to-ceiling panels of polycrystalline silicon cells provide extra power, optimized for cloudy days, and shading for interior spaces. And the theme of following the sun is taken up here too, since the panels pivot at the house's corners to follow the progress of the sun in the sky. It's hardly surprising that the designers of the Black and White House have applied for a total of five patents for the various systems that run it.

The aggregate output of the roof- and wall-based PV systems is 14.9 kW, exceeding the needs of the house by a factor of six. This is augmented by a solar hot water system for domestic hot water and radiant floor heating.

So how are we - or, more realistically, the juries - supposed to judge between a house like this and that of Rice University, intended for low-to-middle-income use in housing projects? By design, that house deploys only as much PV as is needed to balance its expected energy consumption. Or the Puerto Rican entry, designed to mimic traditional Caribbean building styles while being energy-efficient and affordable? Or Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Meltwater house, in which an emphasis was placed on using locally obtained waste materials?

The short answer is that they will, but the final scores the juries assign cannot possibly reflect the disparate values applied by teams to their efforts. In effect, the twenty teams took off in twenty different directions - Iowa State to design a home specially for seniors, Ontario to craft a solution for higher northern latitudes, Louisiana-Lafayette to reflect Cajun traditions and customs in its design. For each team, a unique concept.

As for Team Spain, the students don't regard the surplus energy produced by their ‘pyramid' as excessive, more as an amount of power waiting for a user. This could be a plug-in hybrid car, or a doubling in size of the family living in the house (for which purpose the house is of modular design, and can be expanded outwards or upwards). In fact, the pyramid with its support structure can be used without a house beneath it; it could be used as a power-generating carport, or as a mini-generator for several buildings, or as a mobile power source for field operations. Applications, in short, far beyond the scope of the Solar Decathlon.

Since no scoring system could possibly level the playing field for all these players, we feel constrained to regard the ‘competition' element of the Solar Decathlon as little more than an incentive for the teams to apply their creativity to the best possible ends. Looking around the houses in the solar village (and if you haven't yet made the journey to Washington to experience them, don't delay much longer!), we'd say it's done an excellent job of that.


About one hundred of the reasons why you shouldn't wait to visit the Solar Decathlon: Crowds lining up today to visit (left to right) the Team California, Puerto Rico, and Illinois solar houses.

By Chris Stimpson
Executive Campaigner
Solar Nation

Oct 10: Themes abound at the Solar Decathlon, and not necessarily the obvious ones ("we have solar panels on the roof!") Cornell University's entry, the subject of my first blog from this event, presents what the team calls a 'post-agrarian' look, with its silo-shaped living spaces and wild grasses serving as a reminder of the vanishing farmland of upstate New York. Iowa State's Interlock House is designed with seniors in mind. Wisconsin-Milwaukee's house physically mimics the shapes of the landscape surrounding the university while striving to use only local and regional materials in its construction. And Team Boston has made a point of using off-the-shelf items for almost all the needs of its Curio.House, with an eye to predictability of market construction costs.



Curio.House, in fact, has already been sold by the Tufts/Boston Architectural College team to a developer in Sandwich, on Cape Cod. This will become a centerpiece of 'Community Green', a post-homeless community off Old King's Highway in the Cape's oldest town, sponsored by the Cape's non-profit Housing Assistance Corporation.

The 'affordability' theme is reflected in Team Boston's choice of micro-inverters on the panels in their house's 6.4-kW PV array, allowing each panel's performance to be individually monitored. Although not unique in the competition, the arrangement makes the point that the array's size -- and therefore cost -- can be tailored to a homebuyer's needs.

Jeff Stein, Dean of the architectural school, points out that Curio.House is a "house of the present", except for one important feature: the floor-to-ceiling windows covering most of the building's north and south walls. These are certainly not off-the-shelf items, but one day might be. They are triple-layered, the layers separated by a clear aerogel that is warmed by the sun during the day, and re-radiates that warmth into the house after sundown. On the north windows, polycarbonate panels decrease heat loss and help block winter winds.

Team Boston's house also features a glycol-based solar thermal array for domestic hot water and radiant heating, LEDs and CFLs for lighting, exterior roller shades and a south roof overhang to regulate heat incursion, and an energy recovery ventilator to provide fresh outside air while minimizing energy loss. What's important about these items is not that they're unique to Curio.House -- they can be found in many buildings in the solar village -- but that they are available in today's construction market. And what matters most, for the healthy growth of renewable energy/energy efficiency, is for the construction industry to adopt these kinds of techniques and materials as standard in new homes. In fact, when choosing what to include in -- and exclude from -- bills of materials in order to control costs, one would hope that builders would sacrifice items such as granite counter tops and crown moldings in favor of energy-related features.

But for that to happen, the customer -- the homebuyer -- has to demand it. And that's where the real value of one hundred thousand people visiting the Solar Decathlon, and learning what's possible with today's technology, is to be found.

By Chris Stimpson
Executive Campaigner
Solar Nation

Oct 9: Two days ago I commented on the vast difference, both in design philosophy and cost, between two of the houses in this year's Solar Decathlon. The Team Germany entry was designed to 'push the envelope', to maximize solar power output with minimal regard for market pricing of the house, and seems to have succeeded in that aim. Other entries, notably that of Rice University,* have targeted a price range that would make a solar house a realistic option for municipal housing projects or middle-income buyers.

The Rice philosophy reaches beyond the parameters of the competition. It has been the team's intention from the outset to design a home that they could -- and would -- give back to the community. Within a few weeks of Rice's house leaving Washington at the end of the competition, it will be handed over to Houston's Project Row Houses for use as a family home in the city's Third Ward. It will eventually be joined by five similar houses, some of which will be two-story. It was the agreement with this neighborhood-based organization, in fact, that led to the building being christened ZEROW HOUSE; (note: student humor).

This does not mean, however, that the Rice team is building a slum. "The house we built already has a life beyond the Solar Decathlon, so it's important that we get this right," said David Dewane, team architecture lead.

By Chris Stimpson
Executive Campaigner
Solar Nation

 With these words, and backed by 450 competing solar decathletes from five countries, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu officially opened the 2009 Solar Decathlon on the National Mall in Washington DC. (Before he could wield the mammoth scissors, however, he had to shake hands with, and be photographed with, all 450 of them. That's energy).

Secretary Chu is finally in a position to promote and steer policies that could actualize ideas that he and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. developed many years ago. He spoke today of their investigation of the potential savings to be had in the heating and cooling of buildings. Their conclusions included the astonishing estimate that residential and commercial buildings could use 75-80% less energy than they then did, simply by focusing on energy efficiency. And indicating the solar houses stretching away down Decathlete Way behind him, he reminded his audience that even without the use of solar power, these buildings enshrined many of the principles that kind of saving required.

The Team To Beat

By Chris Stimpson
Executive Campaigner
Solar Nation

Who is the 'team to beat' at the 2009 Solar Decathlon? (We New England Patriots fans like to talk in terms of the 'team to beat'...) It would have to be the Technische Universitat Darmstadt, aka Team Germany, and for the usual host of reasons: they won last time.

Solar Decathlon Build-out Gathers Pace

By Chris Stimpson
Solar Nation Executive Campaigner

The sun rose this morning on a new development in progress in downtown Washington -- about as downtown as you can get, in fact. On the National Mall, stretching from the Washington Monument east to the Smithsonian 'Castle', twenty small houses were in different stages of construction. They had started their journey to the capital from points as far away as Darmstadt, Germany and as close as the state of Virginia, to compete in the 2009 Solar Decathlon.