It Takes A Solar Powered Village

Yes, it takes a village, and it exists right now—and will be around through October 20^th—on the Mall in Washington D.C. It’s not the kind of village Hilary Clinton put forth as a parenting strategy, it’s a green village—a village of solar powered houses. The hope being that this display of intellectual power and green energy will move solar technology forward—both awareness of its potential uses and the technology itself.  The solar powered houses in this interactive solar neighborhood are part of a competition sponsored by the Department of Energy, its biennial Solar Decathlon. (Mortgage bankers, start your solar engines…) Twenty, student-led teams from various universities—supported by construction professionals—began assembling their solar homes at the end of September.  Those 20 teams got $100,000 in seed money from the DOE.

A story on the environmental website GREENandSave said that participants are judged in ten categories such as “Market Viability and “Home Entertainment” which evaluates the entrants’ ability to use commercially available materials to demonstrate that a fully sun-powered home can be built cost effectively on a wide scale.  A gallery of photos of some of the houses can be seen on the DOE’s website.

According to CNET, Solar-powered homes have been around for decades—“the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called its Solar Decathlon entry MIT Solar 7 because it’s the seventh solar home made on campus. The first was in 1939.”

Things have gotten a bit more high-tech. Many of the homes featured networks of sensors and control systems to regulate light or heating and cooling. Carnegie Mellon University and Santa Clara even developed software for the residents to track energy usage in real time and centrally control home appliances.

The teams are using some pretty advanced building materials too, like aerogels, a translucent insulation used to build walls in their houses by MIT and the Georgia Institutive of Technology teams. The walls are insulated but let in natural light.

Martin LaMonica, who wrote about the event for CNET’s Green Tech blog, said, “New technologies, like a solar-powered home-cooling system or photovoltaic blinds, are developed just for the event. But a lot of it comes down to smart design–integrating solar intelligently and making the space livable, even better than what most of us have today.”

The winner of the contest will be announced tomorrow, Oct. 16