September 24 2007

The Solar Decathlon is almost here...

The 2007 Solar Decathlon is coming to the National Mall in Washington, DC this October! Houses will be on display in the "solar village" from October 12th through the 20th at 10am-5pm on weekends and 11am-3pm on weekdays. The entire Decathlon is closed on October 17th for competition purposes.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Solar Decathlon, it is a Department of Energy (DOE) sponsored competition between 20 universities to design and build a house that is powered exclusively by the sun. Photovoltaic arrays and Solar Domestic Hot Water tubes galore! The competition is divided into ten separate competitions (hence decathlon) that gauge the effectiveness of different sustainable strategies. Contests include:

• Architecture - 200 points
• Engineering - 150 points
• Market Viability - 150 points
• Communications - 100 points
• Comfort Zone - 100 points
• Appliances - 100 points
• Hot Water - 100 points
• Lighting - 100 points
• Energy Balance - 100 points
• Getting Around - 100 points

This is a wonderful event for the entire family. Great cutting edge designwork, innovative materials, novel building technologies, electric cars, and did I mention that these houses are all transported from their respective university building sites by truck... so they are all modular to some extent.

For more information please visit the main Solar Decathlon Web site.

Here is a link to the 2007 Carnegie Mellon SD Web site (I was a team member and designer! Go CMU)

And below is a gallery of images from the 2005 Solar Decathlon Competition. It was wet as you will see... Enjoy!

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September 24th, 2007 at 1:36 AM. Posted in Architecture. Share this post.