The Road to Solar Decathlon

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“Roadtrip!”
Just that one serendipitous word uttered by Kelsey King and her three girlfriends in 2009 has led to the University of Louisville’s entry into the 2013 United States Department of Energy Solar Decathlon competition. On her way into the Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C., King saw a large sign that read “Solar Decathlon.”
“Guys, it’s renewable energy!” said King. “We have to go check it out!”
“We have to see the Hope Diamond first,” responded her friends. “We’ll come back afterwards.”
After visiting the Smithsonian, they discovered that the Solar Decathlon had closed for the day. King looked up the competition online and discovered that it invloved building a 1.000 square foot house, run entirely on solar power.

King approached the Conn Center for Renewable Energy Research at the University of Louisville, who put the UofL faculty team together and convinced professor McGinley to serve as the overall leader. As a civil structure engineer with extensive project management experience, McGinley was ideal for the role. Together with the Conn Center, he brought together support from J.B. Speed School of Engineering’s Dean Neville Pinto, General Electric engineers, and the Ball State University College of Architecture and Planning to develop the competition proposal. Professors Matt Bohm, Matt Turner, and Chris Foreman, along with Conn Center Senior research engineer Thad Druffel, provided additional technical information, support, and mentoring, to spur technical ideas for the proposal development. The hard work paid off in April 2012, when the DOE announced that Team Kentuckiana had been selected to compete in the 2013 Solar Decathlon.

King’s enthusiasm for the project helped recruit other engineering students, including Stephen Miranda, Brian O’Neil, and Hunter Cambron.

“It looked like a project that would have a lot of good hands-on experience and practical application for what we’ve been learning in engineering,” said O’Neil.

The Solar Decathlon is a decade-long, collegiate, international competition that is held every other year. From over 100 team proposals, only 20 teams were selected to compete in the 2013 competition. Even being invited to compete is a great honor, and only awarded to teams that the DOE believes will actually get it done.

During the competition in 2013, the teams will be judged on 10 contests – five of which are metered and five of which are juried. The five metered contests cover hard metrics, such as the requirement that various parts of the house (such as the refrigerator), or the total energy usage, are within a range of temperature degrees or kilowatts, and play to the strengths of the engineering students on the team. The five juried contests examine engineering, architecture, communications, market appeal, and afforability.

“We’re engineers,” said Cambron. “We can build a house. It will be perfectly engineered, very efficient, but it won’t be a very pretty house.”

To balance such technical and aesthetic requirements, UofL has partnered with Ball State University’s College of Architecture and Planning as well as the University of Kentucky’s School of Engineering (an entrant of the very same 2009 competition that King came across in Washington, D.C.).

About a year ago, the UofL students met the Ball State students in the first of many design weekends. For the first time, each school was exposed to the other school’s way of thinking.

“As engineers, we’re taught to think inside of the box,” said King. “This is the system; this is how it’s supposed to go. It’s interesting to see it from their perspective.”

“Do you remember the huge amount of glass they wanted in the one design?” said McGinley. “They wanted to bring the outside in. And it was a cool design, but impossible to heat and cool practically.”

It’s clear that giving guidance to both the technical and the aesthetic sides is an important aspect of the faculty leader role. In addition to McGinley, Donald Colliver from UK is serving in an advisory capacity to the group. Once the project is further underway, a limited number of students from the UK’s College of Engineering will also join the team.

Because there’s no limit to how much teams can spend, it would seem that an easy way to win the competition would be to spend the most money. In fact, that’s what happened in the very first Solar Decathlon. To address this issue, the DOE added the affordability contest that sets the target price of the home at $250,000. Any entrants who go over the target price are point penalized. McGinley estimates that the average target price for each of the entrants is realistically around $350,000-$400,000, and that doesn’t include transportation and prototyping costs. Given that the 2013 competition will be held at Orange Country Great Park in Irvine, California (over 32 driving hours away), it’s critical for the team to design a house that will have minimal transportation costs. For the average entrant, McGinley estimates that over $750,000 will be required for total costs. Of course, for international entrants, the costs can be much higher. During the last competition, the team from New Zealand had their entire country assist with the funding of transportation costs, which easily accounted for half of their total costs. Thanks to generous commitments from General Electric, UofL’s Speed School of Engineering, the Conn Center, Ball State, and UK, combined with funding from the DOE, the team has raised 20-30 percent of their total costs, but will need to raise the remainder to see their vision through to the end.

As if those weren’t the only challenges, the design of the house has to work in Irvine, California and the target market, Louisville,. It will require compromise for the design to work for the two different locales.

“Irvine is one of the best areas for solar production in the U.S. and the temperature ranges throughout the year make heating and cooling easier,” said O’Neil. “Louisville is a lot colder in the winters, obviously.”

Repeatedly, the team stressed that affordability is a critical aspect of their design. For example, the team calculated that they would need 6 kilowatts of solar array on the south-facing side of the house to power their house for the metered events. They researched various solar cell technologies. All panels used in the competition must be commercially available. Some newer types of solar cells, called bifacial cells, that have photovoltaic cells on two sides. They were used by Appalachian State University with great success at the 2011 Solar Decathlon.

“They’re great, but they are more expensive,” said Miranda. “Since we’re really focused on affordability, we’re sticking to traditional polycrystalline cell solar panels.”

“I’ve learned that just because something costs more, that doesn’t mean we should get it,” said Cambron.

The team will have five days to assemble the house on-site in Irvine. Although no one actually lives in the house, several of the contests will simulate home living usage, such as one that requires doing a load of laundy consisting of six towels each day. The teams will also be required to host two dinner parties and a separate movie night. If solar is the only allowed source of power for the house, just how will they host dinner parties and movie nights? During the competition, every house is connected to a miniature electrical grid set up by the DOE. While the solar panels are active during the day, any extra energy will flow back into the mini-grid. At night, the homes will be powered by that energy, via the mini-grid.

“We’re hoping we produce more energy than we consume during the day,” said Miranda.

According to McGinley, connecting homes to local mini-grids is actually a more commercially viable way of fully utilizing solar energy production.

“Most states are looking at ways to accept the energy produced,” said McGinley. “There are justifiable reasons for caution – power quality, inability to control and balance the load on the grid. However, PVs are a good source to meet peak need and still utilize the grid. If we could offset peak need with these systems, we’ll be able to offset our ever-growing power consumption needs and still use the grid.”

By October of 2012, the team has to submit a design development document that will result in about an 80-90 percent design freeze. The next major project plan deadline is the construction document package (what a builder references to build a building) that is due in February of 2013. The plan is for the team to already be building by then, which will give them the opportunity to assemble and disassemble the house two or three times before heading to Irvine in October of 2013.

“A lot of teams who competed in the past discovered that they had unanticipated issues because they didn’t attempt to assemble their house until they were on-site at the competition,” said King. “They had a lot of things they had to fix, [such as] a water heater that wouldn’t fit.”

“Yeah, I don’t want to hear any ‘uh-ohs,’ Said McGinley. “We’re actually ahead of the game, based on feedback from Dr. Colliver and other teams. We’re farther ahead than other teams in the past. I want to keep that momentum going. It’s easier to pull one to two all-nighters now, than two to three weeks of no sleep right before.”

Besides getting ample practice assembling and disassembling the house, the team also hopes to have public outreach days before the competition. One of the contests is a juried communications contest and the team will be judged on what message they are trying to convey and how well they convey it. To assist with the effort, the UofL Department of Communication will help the team develop a communication plan.

“Plus, we want to engage the community and acknowledge the support of our sponsors,” said McGinley. “The recognition that sponsors receive on-site is restricted by DOE rules, so we want to be able to do it in a bigger fashion locally to acknowledge their support.”

One thing is clear: This team wants to design a house for residents that is viable and affordable. The Kentuckiana region is regularly affected by severe weather and the rebuilding efforts that follow are opportunities to implement better designs, including solar power systems. Although sustainability is a

nonjudged aspect of the competition, it is often incorporated into designs, and as McGinley pointed out, “Solar is inherently sustainable.”

Another aspect of the team’s design plans that makes them viable is that the base of the house’s structure must fit on two semi-trailer rigs for transport. These requirements are similar to those for a double-wide manufactured home so that the house will be able to use standard transportation infrastructure.

Once the competition is over, the unit will be turned into an energy education outreach center on UofL’s campus. Its usefulness will continue for years beyond the competition and it will also be a test bed for new technologies developed at UofL and the Conn Center.

–Grace Simrall

The following 20 teams have been selected from around the world to compete in Solar Decathlon 2013:

  1. Arizona State University and the University of New Mexico (Phoenix, Arizona, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.)
  2. Czech Technical University (Prague, Czech Republic.)
  3. Hampton University and Old Dominion University (Hampton and Norfolk, Virginia.)
  4. Middlebury College (Middlebury, Vermont.)
  5. Missouri University of Science and Technology
  6. (Rolla, Missouri.)
  7. Norwich University (Northfield, Vermont.)
  8. Queens University, Carleton University, and Algonquin College (Kingston and Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.)
  9. Santa Clara University (Santa Clara, California.)
  10. Southern California Institute of Architecture and California Institute of Technology (Los Angeles and Pasadena, California.)
  11. Stanford University (Stanford, California.)
  12. Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, New Jersey.)
  13. The Catholic University of America, George Washington University, and American University (Washington, DC.)
  14. The University of North Carolina at Charlotte (Charlotte, North Carolina.)
  15. The University of Texas at El Paso and El Paso Community College (El Paso, Texas.)
  16. University of Calgary (Calgary, Alberta, Canada.)
  17. University of Louisville, Ball State University and University of Kentucky (Louisville, Kentucky; Muncie, Indiana.; and Lexington, Kentucky.)
  18. University of Nevada Las Vegas (Las Vegas, Nevada.)
  19. University of Southern California (Los Angeles, California.)
  20. Vienna University of Technology (Vienna, Austria.)
  21. West Virginia University (Morgantown, West Virginia.)

Source: solardecathlon.gov/teams.html

 

 

The 10 Solar Decathlon contests:

  • Architecture (juried)
  • Market appeal  (juried)
  • Engineering (juried)
  • Communications (juried)
  • Affordability (juried)
  • Comfort zone (measured)
  • Hot water (measured)
  • Appliances (measured)
  • Home entertainment (measured and juried)
  • Energy balance (measured)

Source: solardecathlon.gov/contests.html

 

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