The results are in for the Solar Decathlon, a biennial contest in which 20 colleges bring 20 cutting-edge solar-powered houses to the mall in Washington, DC, for a friendly energy-efficiency smackdown. This year's winning entry, built by architecture students from the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany, blew away the judges and had thousands of people lining up to see it for the entire two weeks of the competition.Top prizes also went to second-place University of Maryland, with its biomimetic LEAFHouse, and "Cinderella story" Santa Clara University, which roared out of the pits to take third place.
The event was a green architecture enthusiast's dream, and the faithful turned out in force -- along with thousands of people concerned about climate change and curious about the possibilities of solar power. All in all, some 120,000 visitors toured the 20 entries and spoke with the teams that built them, including thousands of architects, builders, and homeowners looking for innovation, inspiration, and practical tips.
The team from Darmstadt Technical University kicked off the competition with a first place for architecture, then went on to take the top rank in engineering, energy use, and lighting. One of the Darmstadt house's most dramatic features is an outer shell constructed of wooden louvers with built-in photovoltaic panels, which pivot to capture sunlight at the most direct angle possible. The louvers are controlled by software that optimizes their angle throughout the day.
Their elegant rectangular structure, paneled with German oak, feels bigger than the 800 square feet required by contest rules, largely thanks to a glass wall on the north side that flows into an oak-paneled deck. Its symmetrical interior is organized around a functional core containing the kitchen, bathroom, and shower, with a bedroom and a living room on either end. On the outside, four energy-insulating layers minimize the need for power.
Although this is the University of Darmstadt's first official entry, the team has taken part in the Solar Decathlon once before, explained Barbara Gehrung, a project manager for the University of Darmstadt house, in a conversation in August. "We were a junior partner in the Pittsburgh Synergy [Carnegie Mellon] in 2005. Ten students from Darmstadt took part in their design process in 2004, and we helped build their entry in the 2005 competition. We discussed collaborating in this competition also, but we decided in the end that the distance would make that too difficult , and so we decided to apply in 2007 as our own team."
"It's a friendly competition," Gehrung pointed out. "Students from Pittsburgh flew out to visit us last fall. The teams don't publish every feature before the competition, but once the teams are there in Washington, the spirit is really collaborative. We exchange ideas. We share tools."
The basic design idea was created in an internal competition among students, using computer simulations to meet the competition's rigorous design constraints, Gehrung said. Like many of the competitors, the Darmstadt team had to create a design that would meet those constraints in two very different settings. "One of our challenges was to optimize the house for both climates," said Gehrung.
Green architecture was one of Darmstadt's strong suits going into the competition. "Our unit at the school is one of the main proponents of sustainable architecture among German universities," Gehrung told ArcWire. "And Germany is the leader in the European Union for solar power. We passed a law in 2000 to encourage the use of renewable energy. As a result, we now have the world's largest installed base of solar power per capita."
The law that Gehrung referred to, known in Germany as the EEG, offers cash incentives for installing renewable energy sources. This law has made Germany the world's leading generator of solar power, despite year-round rain and clouds that block the sun for two-thirds of all daylight hours. There were 1,300,000 solar generating units in Germany in 2006, according to the German Federal Association of the Solar Industry -- 220,000 of them installed in 2006 alone. Fully 55 percent of the world's photovoltaic (PV) power comes from solar panels in Germany. Although this still represents only 3 percent of the nation's electricity, the German government plans to increase the share of energy generated from renewable sources -- including solar -- from 13 percent today to 27 percent by 2020.
The EEG was designed to reduce fossil fuel use and fight global warming, but it has also had a positive effect on the German economy. The renewable energy sector provides 250,000 jobs in Germany today; the solar power industry alone, which directly and indirectly employed about 50,000 people by April 2007, is expected to nearly double to 90,000 jobs in five years and reach 200,000 by 2020. The market for photovoltaics in Germany also has plenty of room to grow: A study by the Institute for Social Research and Communication in Bielefeld found that 27 percent of all German homeowners want to use solar thermal energy for heating. Spain, Portugal, Greece, France, and Italy are now among the European countries that are following the German example.
While Gehrung and her colleagues are clearly bullish on solar power, she said, "It's a mixture of renewable energies that will save us from global warming." Asked whether nuclear power might have a place in that mix, she responded with a laugh: "Maybe if it was safe." Like fossil fuel, uranium is "another limited resource," she noted, and presents political risks that wind and solar do not. "It's pretty hard to imagine terrorists attacking a windmill or a PV farm," she said.
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