Solar power competition

The students at the University of Colorado at Boulder who designed this home wanted to demonstrate that solar power can be applied to almost any house. In the process, the Boulder team beat out students at 13 other U.S. universities and colleges to win the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) first solar decathlon competition on October 5, which was held on the grounds of the pedestrian mall facing the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Students at the University of Colorado at Boulder designed this solar house so it could be easily adapted to any building site.

Space heating and cooling are the largest users of energy in residential buildings, and the Boulder team earned high points for its superior ability to maintain a “comfort zone” in the home’s interior through natural ventilation, as well as heating, cooling, and humidity controls, using a minimum amount of energy. The house, which has 65 single crystalline module solar photovoltaic cells on its roof capable of producing 30 kilowatt-hours of energy on a sunny day and uses only commercially available components, was also able to consistently harvest solar energy in amounts equal to or greater than the house’s electrical requirements. “People are coming to our house to get ideas for their own houses,” said Mike Wassmer, a second-year graduate student in Building Systems Engineering at Boulder who has been working on the project for one-and-a-half years.

The University of Virginia’s solar decathlon team built their demonstration home to provide easy access to its elaborate controls.

A student team from the University of Virginia won second place in the competition largely because of their home’s innovative design, which features recycled copper and wood on the building’s exterior. “We wanted to show that it’s really possible to take waste materials and recycle them into things that are far more usable,” says Josh Dannenberg, an architecture student who worked on the project for two years and graduated from Virginia last May. The Virginia entry also boasts what the team claims to be the world’s first residential luminaire, a mirror dish on the roof that tracks the sun and provides natural daylight to areas without windows.

The 10-day contest required students to design and build solar-powered houses that blend aesthetics and modern conveniences with maximum energy production and efficiency. An international panel of experts judged the homes. “The Solar Decathlon proves that solar energy is practical today,” said DOE Secretary Spencer Abraham when conferring the awards to the winning teams. In addition to DOE and its National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the awards were sponsored by BP Solar, The Home Depot, Electronic Data Systems, and the American Institute of Architects.

For more information, go to http://www.solardecathlon.org.