U.S. Department of Energy - Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

Building Technologies Office

The Building of the Solar Decathlon Webinar (text version)

Below is the text version of the Webinar titled "The Building of the Solar Decathlon," originally presented on September 15, 2009. In addition to this text version of the audio, you can access a PDF of the slides, a resource document, and a recording of the webinar.

Operator:
All participants will be on listen-only for the duration of today's conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. I would now like to introduce your host, Ms. Jenni Sonnen. Please begin.

Jenni Sonnen:
Hi — thank you, Terri. My name is Jenni Sonnen, and I'd like to welcome you to The Building of the Solar Decathlon webinar, presented by the building technologies program at the US Department of Energy. We're excited to have Richard King talk to us about the Solar Decathlon today, but before we start I have a couple of housekeeping items to cover. First, I just wanted to mention that everyone today is on listen-only mode. We will have a Q&A session at the end, and you can participate by submitting your questions electronically. To submit a question click on the Q&A link on the top part of your screen, type the question in the box, and click "ask." 

Richard will address as many questions as time allows after the presentation. And just to mention in that little box there's a little hand raised — please don't click on that. Please just type the question and click "ask."  I also wanted to point out that URL on the screen, www.buildings.energy.gov/webinars.html, and on that web page is a link where you can actually download today's slides. And because today's presentation is being recorded, in about a week there should be a video on that page also that you can view. And finally I just wanted to mention we have a few quick questions we'd like to ask before we get started that'll help us learn more about you, the audience, and help us also with future presentations.

So we're going to start with two questions now, and then have two questions at the end of the presentation before the Q&A session. When you see the question please just click on your screen to indicate the appropriate response, and I'll go to the first question now. It should be on your screen, so please look at the question and click the appropriate response to how many people are at your site today participating in today's webinar. I'll just give you a few seconds to respond. Okay, we're about to close this question and move on to the next, so please respond if you haven't. Great, thanks.

For our next question we just want to find out a little bit about your affiliation or organization, so please click on your screen now to answer the question. Okay, I'll give you a few more seconds, and then we'll move on to the presentation.

[Next Slide]
All right, I'll go ahead and close this one now. Thank you for your participation. And now I'd like to introduce Richard King. Richard is the director of the Solar Decathlon, one of the most unique, ambitious and exciting residential solar design events in the country. Richard has been with the US Department of Energy since 1986, working primarily in the solar energy technologies program.

Recently he has been with the Department of Energy's Building and Technology program so that he can work more closely with professional builders to design cost-effective, zero-net-energy homes powered by solar energy. And with that, I'll turn it over to Richard.

Richard King:
Thank you for that nice introduction. Hello, everyone. I am so honored and pleased to be here today to give an overview of the Solar Decathlon — where it got its start, how it's going, and to give a little glimpse into this year's event, which you can see from this slide, it's going to start this October. We start building the village on the Mall early October, and it's open to the public from the 9th through the 18th. So hope you can all — you know if you can't make it — hope you can come down. You also see on this slide the web page, so please make note of solardecathlon.org.

You can go to the web page, get scores, look at all the other teams, what they're doing, see some nice videos, some virtual tours, the scoring. And very importantly how to become a volunteer. We are looking for volunteers this year, and the last slide that I'll end up with has more information on how to volunteer. So we hope you come down.

[Next Slide]
You get a way-cool T-shirt, but you also get to intermingle with people who have all the — want to come down and see the event. So we can use a good 500 different volunteers over that ten-day period. So what is the Solar Decathlon? 

Well, basically we put out a challenge to primarily schools of architecture and engineering to design and build a solar-powered ultra-high-efficiency house from the ground up. And it's important that these universities have like a clean sheet of paper. They're given a lot on the US Mall — a clean sheet of paper so to speak — then they can begin from scratch designing how a solar-powered house, a zero-energy house, an efficient house should be built, with the right green components, the right systems engineering to make it entirely self-sufficient. We picked the US Mall because it runs east-west. It's flat. And all these houses, as you can see from this perspective on top of the Smithsonian roof, they all get equal access to the sun.

And then we can evaluate and judge these houses. It's a big contest; one of those 20 houses down there in 2007 won the event. We judge the houses with world-renowned architectural judges for esthetics and appeal. We had world-renowned engineers come in and look at the engineering. We also measured the performance; we put meters in refrigerators, in dishwashers. Photometers to measure lumens, lighting in the house, heating and cooling, humidity in the house. So we came up with ten different ways to judge houses for esthetics and appeal and design excellence, and then also contest to measure the performance of the house.

We ended up with 10 of them — hence the Solar Decathlon — to get roughly 100 points in each of the 10 areas.

[Next Slide]
And the team at the end of the week that accrues the most points then wins the contest. Now where do you hold it?  I already said we hold it on the National Mall. It's right across the street from where I work, so it ended up . . .

[Next Slide]
just being a perfect spot. We also want all those folks up there in that domed building to come down and look at it too. So it's on the National Mall. We have ten days to build it — no, roughly seven days to build it. And this is on day three in 2007; it ends up being the largest construction site in Washington, DC, for a week.

This is only half of the village; you're looking at ten houses here. The other half is up on the other section. But you can see that these universities — it's a two-year project. So they design and then build the houses on their campus, then disassemble them, take them apart, put them on trucks, bring them to the National Mall, and it's like 20 extreme homes going up all at once. They bring them on trucks, and you can see a crane lifting one of the houses off. They also come on big trailers, and they jack them up and pull the trailer out from under them. But it's a real challenge just to set up this village in that short amount of time, and after a week's time they put plants around them.

[Next Slide]
You put a skirt around — because they're all sitting on blocks maybe two feet up from the ground.

[Next Slide]
 We can't dig in the National Mall. And the village is ready to go — it looks like it's been there permanently. And then we open it to the public and invite a few people down to go through the houses, so it makes a wonderful event. We started the Decathlon in the year 2000, so we've been doing them for a while. It's a two-year project, hence the first one held on the Mall was in 2002, and this is what that village looked like. We had 14 pioneering universities that responded to the challenge, to the call to come down, build a green house in 2002.

And it was — you know the old saying, if you build it they will come, and they certainly did.

[Next Slide]
This is the University of Virginia in 2002 won best architecture, and it was a very green house, as we call them today. The cladding that you see, including the copper cladding, was all pulled out of a landfill. The students sanded it all down and then put finish on it, and that you see a lot of the siding as well as some of the furniture on the inside, you see some old tires pulled out of the landfill which they planted tomatoes in for some lawn decoration.

But that was UVa's, and I wanted to pull out right off the bat in our rules we didn't say they had to be green — they just had to be solar-powered, highly-efficient, and essentially a self-sufficient zero-carbon house. Although a number of them immediately struck out for a very green, recycled …

[Next Slide]
components, you know, to build out of. So they came at it from all different directions. What you see here in the top right and that's the side view of Carnegie Mellon and then the bottom left is the south side of Carnegie Mellon. But I wanted to point out that like you see a green roof up here on part of their house.

They had nice overhangs over here on the bottom one to keep the sun out of the south side, which is using passive solar windows here to let the sun in for space heating, and photovoltaic solar cells for electricity. And up here which you can sort of see is their hot water system that also provided some shade for their green roof. The same with the other house shown in the crosswise diagonal here is the University of Colorado at Boulder, which won the event that year. You see a lot of photovoltaics on the roof.

[Next Slide]
 A nice little smart design. They came in fifth place in architecture, but very energy efficient, and sort of cleaned up in the other categories of heating and cooling, lighting their space, and doing appliances.

One of the challenges that — you know I worked in the US Department of Energy solar program through the ‘90s, and although we had developed very reliable technology, solar [audio glitch] then in cost, getting them esthetically integrated into the building was still a challenge. And we reached out to these universities, the architecture schools, to try to solve that. How do you mount solar panels on a roof …

[Next Slide]
and make them esthetic?  This was an example of one of the universities — Auburn — where they were at the time, you can see them just top-mounted on brackets on a roof. And when they were done it was just a hodge-podge of modules.

[Next Slide]
What we were really looking for is what Crowder College did. They were very innovative, and they came up with a very esthetic way to integrate it. And I want to point out that it was also a very early application. . .

[Next Slide]
of a solar hybrid system, where you have thin-film modules of photovoltaic that created the electricity, and underneath it were their hot water collectors. And this group made their own hot water collectors — here you see one — that you know…

[Next Slide]
the sun's heat below those photovoltaic panels would heat the hot water. So they have both a hot water system here in the center, and the entire roof, all the way across it, is photovoltaic.

And when you've buttoned it up on the end so you couldn't see any wires or the connectors, it was a very integrated group. And to the normal person walking on the street, you wouldn't even know it had a solar system on the roof, and that's what we mean by integrating the solar array, the solar system into the roof so it acts as a watertight roof — your roofing material — and your energy generation system. So all the electricity and all the hot water for this house was supplied from this one roof, including. . .

[Next Slide]
the hot tub on their porch, which was a terrific application for solar systems.

People with hot tubs know how expensive it is to keep this heated on the outdoors. . .

[Next Slide]
especially if you want to use it through the winter. Where the sun's energy can keep this hot tub going for you at 70 % a reduced cost on that, so it's a great application. So that was in 2002. In 2005 we held another Solar Decathlon. It was three years later than the first one, but after the first one it took us a year to go, "Okay, was this successful?  Was this good?  Should we keep doing it?"  And the decision was, "Yes, indeed!"  And the Department then came out and announced that we would be doing this every two years continuously so that schools could plan on it.

And we sent out applications, and we had then 20 respondents in 2005, although 2 of them dropped out. This is a view from the same perch up on the Smithsonian castle building, and you can see some umbrellas out there. In 2005 it rained for two days straight; we had 6" of water on the Mall. Although this is on a day that it's not raining so much during the week…

[Next Slide]
we did have lines of people with umbrellas waiting at these houses. People still really wanted to see this. And it did get sunny — I'll show you some photos from this competition. So here you see second-generation Solar Decathlon 2005. On the top left is the Missouri school, University of Missouri at Rolla.

And again, they pretty much used Crowder College's lead of using thin films on a batten seam roof, and it was nicely integrated. This is Crowder College to the right. Moving down to the bottom left was New York Institute of Technology. It had a 10-kilowatt solar system, but what they were doing was electrolyzing water; splitting water to make hydrogen. And they had a fuel cell in this house to provide electricity instead of batteries. You see south-facing windows for solar passive design, so it's a very nice house. And to the right of that is Virginia Tech University that designed a beautiful house. . .

[Next Slide]
you see even this roof has got a trough in it.

And the water came down, and they got into water recycling…

[Next Slide]
so that the rain water would come down as well as their gray water and be purified, so to speak. Around their house — it was a beautiful house that won best architecture in 2005, the architecture contest. You see clerestory windows up here that gave a lot of daylighting. Very nice décor. . .

[Next Slide]
on the inside. And the walls are made out of nanogel, so they're translucent walls. Highly efficient, but they also let a little light for. . .

[Next Slide]
some day-lighting, and what they did was put LED colored lights…

[Next Slide]
in the walls so that at night you get this spectacular color to their house.

It made some beautiful photography, and if you were walking around at night…

[Next Slide]
it was pretty awesome to be there. So I put the schedule up here to give you an idea. The maximum amount of time you can be on the National Mall in Washington, DC, you get a permit for 21 days. So this is the schedule coming up, and so you see the orange?  It's for the assembly period. They essentially have a week — even though it turns blue here, this is an indication for teams that okay, you get your house up far enough, we're going to start the grid connect and instrument the houses. So this is actually this year's schedule, so we'll start on October first building the village — and you remember what that looks like from the previous slide.

And then the green is the contest. The contest scoring begins on the morning of the 8th and runs all the way through the 15th, and on the 16th we'll do an awards ceremony. And then the purple — you see purple not only on the sides of some of these days, but also on the last three days over the weekend. That's when it's open for public tours; when you can come down, look at the houses, come in them, talk to the team members, get a nice overview of what's inside of each of these houses. And because we're running our contest at the same time and we want to measure them for heating and cooling and other contests, tour hours are 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on weekdays and 10:00 to 5:00 on weekends.

And please not that if you're coming down, don't come down on Wednesday the 14th. We want to monitor the houses on a 24-hour period for inside humidity levels and temperature. And when you have 50 people inside the house and the doors open to let those people in and out, you cannot do that. So we pick the day when the least amount of people come down anyway. . .

[Next Slide]
and that's October the 14th. But all the other days it's open, and we welcome everybody to come. And we take it down in three days. So when the permit starts we just dig right in and start working around the clock, 24 hours.

1) We don't have a lot of time, and 2) those big oversized rigs can only come down inside the city limits — because of traffic problems — between 10:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. So if you want to see most of the unloading you need to come down in the middle of the night and see all this get constructed. And as soon as it's open…

[Next Slide]
this is a photo showing that the people start lining up the minute it's open on that first day. Everybody wants to see who's in. This house here is the University of Maryland last year that won second place. Notice a green wall here on their outside; bifold doors here to open up — either let the sun in in the winter when you want some to come in.

And you can close it up and keep it out in the hot summer days when you don't want that heat in your home.

[Next Slide]
 So I want to give you a quick overview of last year's event — 3rd-generation houses — and when you first look at the University of Darmstadt — and let me back up a second. This competition is open internationally, so we had University of Darmstadt from Germany come into the event. We had the University of Madrid from Spain, and we also had a Canadian team from up in the Montreal area, besides the University of Puerto Rico and 16 schools from across the country.

[Next Slide]
 So University of Darmstadt, when I first looked at it, what's a square box doing here?  It surprised me when it won best architecture, but let me tell you why — it also won best engineering, and it was completely clad in…

[Next Slide]
solar systems, not only on the roof but also on three sides: the east, the south, and then around the back to the west side. So it had a lot of photovoltaics on it; very clever design. This right here is their hot water system. But you have to start peeling it back a little bit to really see not only the architectural excellence but also the engineering excellence from this German team.

As you get closer, you see that all the siding was actually a series of bifold doors that could open and close, and on the bifold doors were these thin-film photovoltaic louvers on, which opened and closed not only to let light in or close light out, but also to track the sun and gain an additional up to 1.8 kilowatts of electricity for the house. So as the sun rose in the east and came around the house to the west side, you'd actually get some solar gain off of these bifold doors. Up under this…

[Next Slide]
sun overhang they put also photovoltaics that were spaced apart a little bit, so you did get some sunlight through it. So it had a little porch, so to speak, before you went inside the house.

And once inside the house, the house just exploded for you. Here I'm showing you the overhang, how you could sit out here on a nice, sunny day, have some sun, close it off it you want to. And then these are two photos side-by-side, and then as you walked through you walked into their kitchen, and again, dependent on how much sunlight you wanted or solar gain coming into your house. Now the challenge of small houses is to have them multifunctional, so this kitchen table slid over and covered up the sink area so you could get it out of the way if you needed room…

[Next Slide]
and store it at night, and then roll it back out to work on it and cut your food on.

As you went around the corner, then you had a table to have your kitchen, but this room also served as the bedroom. And they were clever how they put their bed in the floor, and these — it would fold over and become the floor. And so then when you got up in the morning, you wouldn't have a bed there. You could just fold it away. And then you'd have a nice, big open space in here for your house. Part of their engineering included high-efficiency kind of leading-edge components and one of those is to put thermal mass in your house. You can do it with water; you can do it with masonry. As the heat comes in from the sun in the winter, you want to absorb that heat to slowly re-radiate that out at night to keep your space warm at night.

Another way to do that is through a phase change material that was like tiny little BB paraffin…

[Next Slide]
balls inside the walls, the ceiling and the walls, which would absorb heat or coolness and then re-radiate that back out very slowly. Quite new and innovative in their house. So this center picture is Maryland, but these four pictures on the outside of this slide are all the Darmstadt house. So you can see now this room — I've got it up on the upper left — how the floor can be folded down for space or the bed — which is on the right. And then the kitchen area and you can put the table over top of it.

Another clever design — I showed you Maryland to begin with — they also had a clerestory in their house and a very open feel to it. And that one's shown in the middle here.

[Next Slide]
 So these houses are fully built. Impeccable décor on the inside. Very highly energy efficient and produce zero carbon while we're there. And here's the Maryland house then. So University of Darmstadt won first place, not only for being judged for engineering excellence and innovation and architecture, but they also ran the other contests very well. A highly energy-efficient house, and kept it that way throughout the competition. This is Maryland, which came in second place.

They were in first place all the way up until the last day and just got edged out by the University of Darmstadt. But they also had. . .

[Next Slide]
a beautiful house. Again, I show you green walls, bifold doors on the outside for passive, overhangs, solar system. Here you can see their solar system, now it was angled up. They had seven kilowatts up there.

[Next Slide]
 And here's a clerestory too, so that let in day-lighting. If you can let the sun provide light in your house then you don't need to turn on electric lights, thus saving energy. So on the inside then you see their house was beautiful, and up here you can see clerestories — not only on the north side. You can't see it up here on the south side.

But you can see all the day-lighting in here; the only two lights in this house that are on right now are two LED light-emitting diode lights over their handmade kitchen counter. So this wood over here as well as here was hand-cut and then sanded down. This is off of a big old tree that fell on their campus.

[Next Slide]
  They have an inductive stovetop here; very energy-efficient. The Maryland team designed and built a wonderful house, and came in second place. I did put in a slide that talked about their light-emitting diode lamps. These are the most energy-efficient…

[Next Slide]
lighting you can get, and they also had it on some centralized dimming and switching system.

But here you can see the inside of their house as well as one of the students. They also — one of the leading-edge very conversational pieces within the University of Maryland house. This is a waterfall, which I first thought, "Oh, isn't that a nice decorative waterfall in their living room!"  But it was actually taking humidity out of the house. It's got calcium chloride in it; it's a highly absorptive material, and it actually pulls humidity out of the house. To improve air conditioning in the hot, humid Washington area you want to get that moisture out of your house, and it reduces the air conditioning load.

[Next Slide]
 And it had a little vent out back behind the house, and you could see the steam coming out of it from this waterfall.

So it was not only decorative, but it was actually pulling humidity out of the house. Very clever. I mentioned the other foreign team that we had from Europe was the University of Madrid in Madrid. Very colorful house that they brought over and they built in Maryland through the summer and then brought it down to the Mall. Their whole — these houses — I'll back up a second. These houses had a limitation. They need to be at least 500 square feet and a maximum of 800…

[Next Slide]
square feet in size, so they're relatively small and modular, but as you can see, quite large enough to have a living room and a kitchen and a bedroom and a bathroom in them.

And they put their entire roof area to this solar array; got 8 kilowatts out of it. And then their hot water heater was right here with evacuated tube on a vertical wall in the back.

[Next Slide]
 They also had more photovoltaics on the sliding doors by which — I think I have a view of that. No, I took that out. But on the inside you can look through that wall, through that photovoltaic panel. I wanted to show you another example of green building. This is Team Montreal from Canada, and you can see the green wall where the students were planting plants vertically coming out of walls… 

[Next Slide]
which really cuts down on the heat. So you're growing plants on your south side as well as an insulation barrier for your house.

Because the Canadian team comes from a very cold climate

[Next Slide]
I took this photo of them putting this highly insulative material, foam insulation in their house. They're trying to keep it out. Here's another shot of that house.

[Next Slide]
I really loved the inside of it. Very airy. You can see clerestory windows provided lots of light. They even decided to leave their structural beams… 

[Next Slide]
exposed, where a lot of people cover them up, so that adds some decorative value on the inside of their house. Very well done; we loved the Canadians. We have two Canadians this year in our event. The University of Illinois was in the event.

I wanted to show you that you not only have these… 

[Next Slide]
really high-tech houses; you also have some good Midwestern wood-clad houses. Have a much warmer feel to them, and the University of Illinois was a very innovative team. They took — up here on the ceiling these are recycled old backs of refrigerators. And you know how a refrigerator works. You're trying to use a little heat exchanger that'll keep food inside your refrigerator. So they turned it around, and this was their air conditioning system. So they would run their coolant through these grids, these backs of refrigerators, all the way around their house, and it really worked well.

They won the most points for the contest which is comfort zone… 

[Next Slide]
which is heating and cooling in their house. But at first I looked up there and I thought, "What will these kids think of next?" 

[Next Slide]
 But it worked — the proof is in the pudding. It worked, and they got best, they won the most points for that. Another team — this team is from California. It had to drive the farthest, although the German and Spanish team actually covered the most distance over the water. The team that had to drive the farthest was Santa Clara. It's a small university in San Jose, outside of San Francisco, and they came in third place.

And although the architecture jury placed them rather low, they just cleaned up on energy efficiency. They had… 

[Next Slide]
a large array, 7 kilowatt sun power array. They also had the largest flat panel solar thermal array, so they were not only heating space and cooling and their hot water being made with it, they were also running an absorption chiller with the heat. It kind of runs an air conditioner in backwards, using the heat to run a chiller, and it worked very well. Like I said, they cleaned up in heating and cooling too and scored very well.

[Next Slide]
 This is a picture of their leading-edge absorption chiller… 

[Next Slide]
which now uses… 

[Next Slide]
hot water from the sun to make air conditioning.

They also were quite green in a lot of their materials that they built the house out of. Here this is recycled denim, which they were using for insulation. And these beams up on their ceiling is made out of bamboo; it's recycled material that grows very fast, and they made a patent on this because it's the first time I-beams were ever made with such a soft, fast-growing wood material as bamboo.

[Next Slide]
So a little innovation there from these teams. Here's another shot of Santa Clara's house then on the inside. This is the architecture jury inside… 

[Next Slide]
evaluating the house for that contest. You can see south-facing windows, nice open area. One of the more innovative houses I wanted to show you was the University of Texas — I was going to say Austin.

This is Texas A&M — excuse me — where they had… 

[Next Slide]
components to the house as well as a little carport. This is all their solar hot water system, and what you can't see here very well is not only did solar work well, but if you're in a windy area you can also use windmills. And they were clever enough to at least put on display these residential-sized windmills bolted onto… 

[Next Slide]
their porch. They were made by AeroVironment, but if you're in Texas and you have a very windy area, by all means don't just use solar. You can use wind also if that's your preference. So these students go through a whole week of contests, besides being judged.

[Next Slide]
 You know they work two years to design very innovative houses, and this shows that the University of Darmstadt won first place for the event overall. They were very happy. I put in the final results here. Darmstadt,

[Next Slide]
Maryland, Santa Clara — I went through some of these. I showed you the Madrid house and some of the others. A great time for all of them. No matter where you come from the students get… 

[Next Slide]
just a wealth of information out of the Solar Decathlon. There's no less than 2,000 of them or so. They learn teamwork. They all pitch in. This is several teams helping out… 

[Next Slide]
the Colorado team on a moment; took a picture of that.

They give tours throughout the event. This is a photo of how that works.

[Next Slide]
 They bring them in, they explain all their components, their energy-efficient appliances; explain their theory and their strategy behind their design.

[Next Slide]
 And the outreach is impressive; we expect again… 

[Next Slide]
over 100,000 people coming to the event — I kind of showed you that. So this year in 2009, we have eight returning teams from '07 and one from '05, Virginia Teach. And then we have 11 new teams, and we're very excited about some of these new teams. Ohio State and Rice and Iowa and Boston, and some of the California teams and Minnesota.

So I showed you a map here where they're spread out around the country. Don't forget those two — Darmstadt and Madrid are coming back.

[Next Slide]
Darmstadt back to defend their title. So this is the fourth generation team coming. Here are the ten contests. You can go to our web page and learn more about that, how all the contests are roughly 100 points except for lighting design and communications. Then we carve off a little there for net metering; they get 50 extra points for trying to generate surplus energy… 

[Next Slide]
from their houses. That's new this year, is net metering. So those are the ten contests, and I won't slow down this presentation for that.

But I wanted to make a point — you know, what we didn't understand when we started this back in 2002, then as you hold more of them — and we're onto our fourth generation and I've used that terminology specifically because it's that iterative process that is driving this technology in getting better and better. And that's the scientific method; you design and build something and you go out and test it, and you pick it. You learn from it and you go back to the drawing board. You redesign, and then you go out and test it and you pick it, and you learn from it. And you come back and redesign again. And these teams, this slide shows Virginia Tech in 2002, 2005 — they have their 2009 house here in Washington now.

You can see the improvement, and they learn, and they learn from others each event, and then they go back to the drawing board. So this event has a real research and development component to it that the Department of Energy is getting a lot of value out of.

[Next Slide]
 And here are some of the design concepts for… 

[Next Slide]
the '09 event, which starts in two weeks. And you can see that indeed they're getting more spectacular. They're getting more energy-efficient and the architects are doing their homework. This is the Team California, the Santa Clara team… 

[Next Slide]
teaming with the California College of Arts, designed just a wonderful house. It's called the Refract house.

[Next Slide]
 You go in and it curves around; pretty special stuff. But you've got to come down. I put up the schedule again. It's open to the public October 9th through…  

[Next Slide]
the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th, open for tours. So come on down, learn about these houses — and if you can't, follow the web page like I mentioned. There's so much to do and see early on, you know, during… 

[Next Slide]
the construction process, to see this going up, and then during the event there's judging, there's cooking — the teams go through a lot of the stuff. You can see quite a bit of this stuff firsthand if you want. And then there's a lot to learn; we have a lot of information down there… 

[Next Slide]
for any visitor who comes to learn about energy efficiency.

Energy-efficient appliances, Energy Star appliances, components, solar systems, there's a great deal there. And to finish up this talk, if you really want a firsthand view of this as well as help us out, we need a lot of volunteers. So here's information of where to go to volunteer. It's on our web page; the sign-up is pretty easy. It's on the left navigation side of SolarDecathlon.org, and information is there. So come on down to the Solar Decathlon. It starts here in just a couple weeks.

[Next Slide]
 So that'll finish my presentation. I wanted to certainly leave some time for a few questions, which we have a few minutes left.

Jenni Sonnen:
Yeah, and actually thank you so much, Richard. This is Jenni again. Before we go on to the Q&A session, I just wanted to ask a couple of follow-up polling questions. So I will put the first one on the screen now, so please go ahead and read this question and click on your computer the appropriate response. We'll give you a few seconds to do that. I'll be moving on to the second question, so if you could please go ahead and make the response. Great, thank you. I'll move on to the next question. This is to find out how the presentation met your expectations for today, so please go ahead and click the appropriate response.

I'll give you just a few more seconds on that one. Great. And with that, we'll turn it back over to Richard to address some of the questions that he has received today. And you can continue submitting questions if you'd like by using the Q&A tool at the top of the bar. And Richard, did you get some questions you'd like to talk about now?

Richard King:
Yeah, I got some great questions here. Technically I talked about a few cell for the New York Institute of Technology house and was it effective, and no, they didn't win the contest, but when both fuel cell technologies as well as solar becomes more cost-effective, it very well might be an alternative. But it didn't work very well for the contest. Do hybrids perform effectively for heating and solar water heating separately?  It's new technology. I know of one company installing quite a few hybrid systems. You've got — if you build it correctly, I think they'll work okay, although most systems out there are separate individual technologies with separate warrantees on them.

Financial questions — what is the typical total kilowatts consumed for these green homes?  I think for these small homes we forced six people in them, six decathletes. They must stay in them; they must cook and wash clothes and do all that for six people. They probably use 20-25 kilowatt hours a day, so all these solar systems are oversized more than what they need. These are energy-surplus houses, and they make them that way because it's a contest and they want to try to win. But for a typical house you can probably get away with 4 kilowatts, certainly 5 kilowatts is all you need. How much do these houses typically cost to build? 

And the average cost — we've been getting in some data already on the 2009, and they range from about $200,000.00 up to about $500,000.00. Now these are prototypes. These are pretty leading-edge houses, but nonetheless that's their cost range to build this house and then bring them to Washington and put them up. I think if a builder got a hold of these designs and build 200 of them in a line in one big sub-development, you could cut those costs down by 50 to 25 % easily. How many teams apply for entry?  Well, we had 40 proposals in 2007. We can only pick 20; that's all the room that we have on the National Mall, so we make a village of 20 homes. We're open for teams to get into the 2011 event.

Write your proposals. It's highly competitive because the Department of Energy also gives $100,000.00 to each team to help offset the cost. The rest of the money they have to fund-raise themselves. What happens to the houses?  Ah, this is a great question!  The houses all go back to a permanent place. They're either put on campus — there's a number of universities who put these houses on their campus. They're used for visitors' housing or as a year-round test bed to learn further from. They're placed in front of museums or some central spot. Some of them are sold to third-party clients as a way to raise the money, so there's a number of them out there where there are families living in them, either in Austin Texas, they're out in Colorado. So they all go someplace.

They're either for show, to learn more from, or just simply sold. How can I follow daily the competition?  If you're not in Washington, DC, well, our web page is going to have virtual tours. It's going to have daily updates from the village. It's going to have little videos on it, updated videos, and of course the scoring will be on our web page. So keep that in your favorites, and every day through the month of October you need to dial it up and see what's new on the Mall. Another question — can you power the electric cars from the houses?  Yes!  In the first three contests we had as contest ten getting around, and in addition to supplying all the electricity for the house, teams had to plug in a neighborhood electric vehicle.

And to win contest ten, it was the team that could put on the most miles in that electric vehicle. So if you're generating electricity from a solar system you can by all means use that to recharge your electric car. Now we've done away with that in 2009. All those houses before, in 2002, '05, and '07 were stand-alone. They had big battery banks in them. And we want to be more like what 99 % of the houses in the United States solar houses are connected to the grid, to a net meter. It's a meter that's designed to run in both directions. It's a bidirectional meter for your house. So your electrons flow into the grid — out of your house backwards into the grid during the day when the sun is out and you've got excess electricity.

And at night when you want to keep your refrigerator going and watch that football game, then you want to buy, essentially buy back that electricity, and now it's flowing in the other direction. And so to have a zero net energy house, that terminology comes from that at the end of the month and at the end of a year, your net meter — if it runs zero, that means you've given the utility as much as you've needed, and you've got no electric bill, essentially. And if you design your house right and put enough photovoltaics on it, you can have a zero net house. In other words, you're supplying all your own electricity from the solar system, and you're not actually paying anything to the utility except for a hookup charge.

A question — how do high ceilings affect the energy efficiency of a home?  They typically — hot air rises, so to my knowledge anyway of high ceilings is to let that hot air just rise up a little bit in your house, and you actually feel a little cooler down along the floor area. But other than that, it does add more volume to your house. How do the students' innovations become commercially available?  Good question. As I talked about, there were several patents had come out of what the students are doing. They go on. There's a number of companies that have started out of core Solar Decathlon teams. They go on into business. The universities make the patents.

They transfer that so these innovations become commercial products. It's also through just the simple method of technology transfer — outreach to the building community, the architectural community, the engineering community. We invite them down, they come through the houses. A lot of articles are written. They read those articles, they learn about what these new innovations are, and hopefully — that's the whole intention of the Decathlon is to get more and more of this technology out to the public and into the commercial industrial sectors. What would be the payback picture for an investment in solar energy for a three-bedroom house in New Jersey? 

I'm from Virginia, but I can answer it generally. The payback for solar systems is roughly three to seven years for a hot water system, and probably anywhere from 10 to 12 to 15 years for a photovoltaic system. It's fairly long for a photovoltaic system, but you have to understand that when you purchase a solar system you're buying equipment up front and it's fairly expensive. But the fuel, the sunlight, is free, versus a fossil-fuel system, you know, natural gas or an oil boiler in your house. The equipment costs some money, but then you're paying monthly bills for the fuel. So let's look at it from a very general — a typical house has a $2,000.00 a year energy bill.

If you're paying $200.00 a month for energy, roughly in a year, 2,000 bucks. It's probably a little bit more, but 10 years that's 20,000, 20 years it's 40,000, over 30 years that's $60,000.00 if the price of fossil fuels does not go up — and I'll bet anyone whatever amount you want that in 30 years the price of fossil fuels is going to be a lot more than it is now. But just let's go with $60,000.00. That's a lot of money that you're paying each month that you don't really add up probably too much. So if you spend $40,000.00 on a solar system, you can do the math real quick, and then have free fuel. When you see the economics you have to look at it in a long-term investment.

The money is spent up front, but then the fuel is free. So you have to get a local contractor to help you work through the numbers. I do want to mention that the federal government has a 30 % tax credit right now, which will buy down and make those solar systems even more attractive. And I want to tell you to go to a great Web site to learn about what your state and what the federal government has in tax incentives and rebates, and that's DSIREUSA Web site. It's D-S-I-R-E-U-S-A. It's Database of State Incentives for Renewable Energy. There's the D-S-I-R-E. Then put a USA on the end, .org.

Click your state, click the federal at the top, and it'll give you all the forms, all the current legislation, and rebates and tax credits. Are there any major changes in the rules and regulations between 2005, '07, and actually it's 2009, and we've tweaked the rules every year for the Solar Decathlon, because we learn a little bit what works good and what doesn't. This year we split appliances into home electronics; in modern homes now with Wii systems and home theater systems, and some people have three computers going in their house. We're finding that the electronics in a house is becoming a larger and larger segment of the electricity usage in a house. So we've partitioned that off.

Students have to show movies in their houses with their home theaters. They have to run televisions for six hours, have their computers on for six hours a day, so we've added that as an actual working contest in the event. And then I talk a little bit about the net metering contest. We've totally replaced the electric car getting-around contest from the previous three to a net meter contest, and you get 100 points for being zero net meter at the end of the contest, and an extra 50 points to the team that produces the most electricity through the event. That team that gets the most flow back to the utility gets 50 points and then it's prorated thereafter.

So that the contest is driving efficiency in these houses; teams want to be as energy-efficient as they can to have more energy left over to gain some extra points. So those are the two major changes that we have. Let's see here — what are some other questions?  I want to stop for a second — it's 1:00. Should I keep going on?  I have a few more questions. Or —

Jenni Sonnen:
If you have a couple, Richard, that seem to be, you know, have been asked quite a bit, please go ahead and address those. Maybe we can just take a couple more minutes, and then we'll wrap things up.

Richard King:
Okay. Yeah, because I'm looking here — yes. I have a really great one from volunteers. Are volunteers required to participate in all ten days, or can they volunteer for a few days?  They can — you have to volunteer for probably at least an afternoon, so the main question is no, you do not. We have all ten days split up into mornings and afternoons, so you can go in there, there's maybe seven, eight different positions, from being a greeter to a runner to a docent to standing at an information table and handing out brochures. And we like to break it up to a morning or an afternoon, so you can stay all day, you can stay for four days in a row, or you can just do one afternoon or one morning.

But go to the Web site and all that information is there. Are design reports from the model homes available?  Yes. All this information is on our Web site. It's being posted as we move along, and it'll be posted and updated after the event. But the blueprints and the specifications and the overviews, and a product directory, so if you wanna know what each house, what refrigerator they used, or dishwasher, for all 20 houses, you can go look that information up. And you especially want to look at the top teams that did best to see what components they used. So all that material will be on our Web site. It's a very rich and deep Web site with lots of information on it.

Are students primarily undergraduate or graduate students?  It's a mix, and it's multidisciplinary. I said most of them are architecture and engineering, but they reach out. They have to fundraise, so they get business and economics students. They have to do interior design. They have to cook, so they get their culinary schools involved. All sorts. They have teams of 100 students or more involved with this, so it's more than just design. They have to build it and make it comfortable and light it and all those other things. So, I think those are the main questions. I urge you again to stay tuned; it's just a wonderfully rich event, and there's something to be learned for everyone.

I hope I kind of gave a broad overview for everybody's interests here. And I certainly thank you for the opportunity to show the great work of all these students.

Jenni Sonnen:
Well, thank you so much for your time, Richard. We really appreciate it. And thanks to everybody for participating today. Again, please visit buildings.energy.gov/webinars.html to get a copy of the slides. And as I mentioned earlier, we will have a video of today's event, and it should be available in about a week. And also please check that page for information about future webinars. Again, thanks for everyone's time. Have a good day.

Operator:
Thank you for calling the digital replay service.

[Silence 01:03:00 to end]

[End of Audio]