Nine teams from the United States, Canada, Chile, and the Netherlands participated in the design-build challenge and finally added innovative solar houses to their hometown communities.
Winning team members from the University of Colorado Boulder
A team of students from the University of Colorado at Boulder won the US Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon Construction Challenge.
The team scored a total of 891.2 points out of 1,000 possible points in 10 challenges. The design team of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada won the second place with a score of 809. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, ranked third with a score of 759.8.
The University of Colorado participated in the first two solar decathlon construction challenges in 2002 and 2005 and won the first place. The team participated in the competition for the third time in 2007.
The 1,200-square-foot, 2-bedroom, 3-bathroom house that it won in this year’s competition is called SPARC to represent its sustainability, performance, achievability, resilience, and community guidelines.
The house includes 24 Trina solar modules with a total capacity of 7.6 kilowatts. This house emphasizes resilience by including future battery storage and power supply of grid silos. It also includes a building automation system that can control the space for daily energy efficiency and achieve grid-friendly power demand curves as needed.
With demand response capabilities, SPARC houses can respond to signals from utility companies and reduce the pressure on the grid as needed. In addition, the building envelope is made of durable materials, requires minimal maintenance over time and can be repaired relatively easily.
Photo: Casey A. Cass/University of Colorado
This house is located in Fraser, Colorado, in a mountainous community west of Denver. The house is close to popular ski resorts and aims to provide affordable housing for those who live and work nearby. For many mountain towns in Colorado, affordable housing is a major challenge, where long-term and short-term housing options are geared to out-of-town visitors.
The Colorado design team stated that under normal operating conditions, SPARC should be able to maintain all conventional loads of available IoT devices through the application programming interface provided by the manufacturer.
In the demo mode, the energy management system aims to arrange loads according to their importance in maintaining home comfort and energy consumption. The load in SPARC House can be unloaded in the following order: domestic water heater, district air heat load, lighting and auxiliary plug load.
In addition to admission to the University of Colorado, there are two notable design contestants here.
The University of Illinois team built a modular house that focused on the concepts of adaptability and affordability for first-time home buyers.
The target market is young professionals in the Urbana-Champaign area who need an affordable entry point into the housing market. The two-bedroom, one-bathroom, 1,200-square-foot house named ADAPTHAUS aims to provide residents with flexible modules that can personalize the house to meet their changing needs.
For example, the team focused on the needs of young professionals for virtual communications, divisible workspaces, and convertible functions. This allows homeowners to use flexible furniture to switch between office space during the work week and Airbnb space during the weekend.
The design includes a 7.68 kW solar array and integrated storage. Owners will be able to sell the extra energy generated by their panels back to the utility company. This house is located in a low-income community, and its energy-saving measures and new technologies can serve as a model for the community, demonstrating the benefits of integrated grid-connected solar systems.
The building’s energy system includes a grid-connected solar array, which includes two 320W mission solar modules, and a smart inverter, allowing users to use time-sharing arbitrage, and extract the cost from the battery storage system when the grid is insufficient. the cost of.
The optimizer on each solar panel increases power generation by allowing the panels to work independently of each other. Solar panels are located in the opaque area of the roof canopy, blocking excessive sunlight in summer and allowing more sunlight in winter. The design provides more roof space without increasing the floor space of the house.
The mobile application is integrated with the building system to provide users with energy consumption prompts and energy consumption graphic displays, and at the same time can realize the automation of household appliances.
Tankless water heaters take up less space and use less energy. The rainwater design allows rainwater to infiltrate the site, help replenish groundwater and support site vegetation, and reduce the pressure on the community's rainwater drainage system.
The house was donated to Habitat for Humanity for the benefit of low-income community members.
The University of Waterloo Warrior House team worked with Chippewas and Habitat for Humanity Gray Bruce from the Nawash Aboriginal community to design and build the first net-zero energy Habitat for Humanity house in an Aboriginal community in Canada.
The target market for the Warrior Home team is the growing family community of Chippewas, which resides in the territory of Nawash First Nation. Habitat for Humanity partners used a lot of donated materials and local volunteers for the construction, helping to keep costs low to ensure the affordability of the homeowners.
Energy-saving building envelopes and mechanical and energy systems save operating costs. A simple design-a single-family house with a basic gable roof-minimizes expensive equipment and skills and promotes the construction of volunteers.
This three-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1,560-square-foot home is designed for growing families, with four bedrooms and two full bathrooms.
Chippewa's community values and connection with nature inspired the design of the Warrior House. A covered front porch facilitates conversations with neighbors, while an open-plan kitchen and living space encourages gatherings with family and friends. In addition, the Warrior House is designed to meet the needs of families that have been passed down from generation to generation in the reserve. Over time, each room can be reused for different purposes, such as an office, nursing room or bedroom for elderly residents.
The house includes a 10.89 kilowatt solar array composed of 33 modules, each with a rated power of 330W. Given the area’s cold winters and hot summers, heat control is prioritized to minimize unnecessary heat loss. The design energy consumption of this house is 55% less than that of a house of similar size. Smart plugs, smart thermostats and other technologies are used to monitor and minimize energy usage.
The central heat pump is combined with a heat recovery ventilator to transfer heat from the outdoors instead of using combustion or electricity, and can switch between heating and cooling modes according to the season.
The water tank of the hybrid electric water heater paired with the heat pump uses electric resistance to heat the water. The heat pump draws heat from the surrounding air, and uses compressors and refrigerants to heat the water using ambient heat.
Building envelope innovations include heightened heel trusses to create space for additional thermal insulation; triple-glazed windows with low-emissivity coatings to reduce solar heat gain; and insulated concrete formwork foundations to provide additional thermal performance.
Other college teams participating in the competition include Weber State University in Ogden, Utah; Kansas State University; University of Denver; Hogeschool Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht, Netherlands; and Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Valparaiso, Chile.
This article was updated on April 20 to reflect some changes due to outdated information provided by the U.S. Department of Energy. These changes include a larger design project for admission to the University of Colorado and a smaller design project for admission to the University of Illinois. It also produced updated photos of the inside of the entrance to Colorado, as well as detailed information related to specific energy efficiency technologies.
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More articles from David Wagman
Excellent student competition! Congratulations to all teams.
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