Lighting, solar energy and self-suffi-ciency are important aspects of the competition, but also critical is how the design
will fare on the market, and the houses are
judged on that as well. In addition to
trying to win in marketability, some teams
already have plans for the homes after
they are hauled back to campus. The Rice
University team’s home, called the
“Ze-Row House,” was designed to be
replicable and to fit into a neighborhood
of row houses in Houston. Knowing that
the home would have to be comfortable
for a family in Houston’s high-heat, high-humidity climate added challenge to the
team’s engineering efforts.
The students gain much from participating in the Solar Decathlon, but nothing more significant, according to BAC’s
Stein, than an understanding of the
consequences of our own actions. He
points to the Nike slogan, “Just Do It,”
which he said students have come to
oppose. Instead they’ve learned that what
works in terms of designing places for
people to live is to “just think about it,
just consider its consequences, just work
out its funding, just understand how to
construct it, just imagine how people
will feel around it for the next few generations, [and] just imagine how to solve
for the future.”
The competition takes place every two
years and is sponsored by the US Department of Energy, which awards $100,000
to each team for design and construction
costs. A European Solar Decathlon will
take place in Madrid, Spain, in 2010. ;
anne.fischer@laurin.com
PV partnership in Arizona
As part of a business- university partnership, a solar technology engineer performs a quality control check on silicon designed for Advent Solar Inc.’s Ventura technology, which is being devel- oped at Arizona State University’s SkySong business incubator.
Apartnership between graduate- level engineering students and a solar energy business is working
on advancing the efficiency of photovoltaics.
In New Mexico, Advent Solar Inc. of
Albuquerque has found a home within
SkySong, Arizona State University’s business incubator in Scottsdale. At SkySong,
alongside ASU engineering students, the
company’s own engineers are working on
Advent Solar’s Ventura technology, which
puts an emitter wrap-through back-contact
cell into a monolithic module assembly.
The module uses low-cost manufacturing
techniques from the semiconductor indus-
try, noted Peter Green, president and CEO
of Advent Solar. The cell-to-module
architecture means that the function of a
single cell now can be addressed. Green
explained, “If one cell is shaded or
impacted, we can address it at the individual cell level.”
The team is developing the module and
the software control, which will monitor
its function without human interface.
Green is confident in his partnership
with ASU. “They’re quite a sustainability
engine,” he said, noting that the university
offers what was the nation’s first degree
program in sustainability. ;
