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NAHB Presents People’s Choice Award at Solar Decathlon
Louisiana State University at Lafayette was the proud winner of the People’s Choice Award at the Solar Decathlon, the U.S. Department of Energy’s popular biennial event on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Chip Dence, a builder from Victoria, Texas, and chairman of the Energy Subcommittee of the NAHB Construction, Codes and Standards Committee presented the award on behalf of the association, which helped to sponsor the event and donated 200 NAHB student memberships to the top-scoring schools.
The Solar Decathlon brought together 20 college and university teams to design, build and operate the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered house.
The active competition lasted for a week, with the prototype home designs open to the public through Oct. 20.
The winning “Cube House” design from Team Germany (Technische Universität Darmstadt) produced a surplus of power even during three days of rain. This is the team’s second-straight Solar Decathlon victory, after winning the previous competition in 2007.
“This competition to build zero carbon homes has been a tremendous undertaking and we have seen terrific efforts by all the teams,” Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman said in a press release after the event. “The ingenuity that comes from individual effort is the promise of our future.”
The Louisiana students also won the Market Viability contest, which evaluated whether the cost-effective construction and solar technology in a team’s design would create a viable product on the open market.
Judges gauged market appeal based on three criteria: livability, feasibility of construction and marketability. The jury gave the school 97 points out of a possible 100.
“The People’s Choice Award is a particularly important award,” Dence told the assembled students at the ceremony. Because it’s based on the home’s popularity among attendees, voters “perceive that it’s a home, and not just a house,” he said.
The 2009 Solar Decathlon featured teams from the U.S., Spain, Germany and Canada competing in 10 contests, ranging from subjective elements such as architecture, market viability, communications, lighting design and engineering to technical measurements of how well the homes provided energy for space heating and cooling, hot water, home entertainment, appliances, and — new this year — net metering.
Worth 150 points, the Net Metering Contest was the most heavily weighted. It challenged teams to generate surplus energy, above and beyond the power needed to run a house, which was fed into a power grid.
The German students earned 908.29 points out of a possible 1,000 to win the competition, followed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with 897.30 points and Team California, featuring students from the Santa Clara University and California College of the Arts, with 863.08 points.
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