U of I Students to Build Solar House

URBANA - A team of University of Illinois students and faculty has been selected as one of 20 teams to compete in the 2009 Solar Decathlon. Each team will receive $100,000 start-up funds from the Department of Energy to design, build and operate an energy efficient, fully solar-powered home. Approximately $500,000 more will need to be raised in order for the U of I team to compete.

The team will spend almost two years designing and building an approximately 800-square-foot home. In the fall of 2009, they will transport their solar house to the National Mall in Washington D.C. and compete against the other institutions, including the previous winner from the 2007 Decathlon Technische Universität Darmstadt, from Darmstadt, Germany.

“The ‘09 competition will be more practical in that the house will be connected to a power grid, instead of relying on batteries during time of little or no sun,” said Patrick Chapman, professor of electrical and computer engineering in the U of I College of Engineering. “We have enough students remaining from the ’07 team to carry forward some experience, get off to a good running start and make fewer mistakes. We’ll also be collaborating heavily with Katrin Klingenberg, from the PassivHaus Institute, US, which is located in Urbana. This collaboration should give us a strong advantage in passive house design.”

During the 10-day competition, students will test their homes in contests and be juried by experts in 10 categories including architecture, livability, comfort, and how marketable the home would be to the public. The winner of the competition is the team that best blends aesthetics and modern conveniences with maximum energy production and optimal efficiency.

“U of I students from many colleges worked exceptionally well together in our first Decathlon last fall in D.C.,” said Michael McCulley, professor of architecture in the U of I College of Fine and Applied Arts. “The student teams designed and built a very attractive house that won both the marketability and thermal comfort contests. The 2007 Decathlon house is now on display in Chicago as it continues to demonstrate the work of our university and the benefits of energy efficient design. We already have many eager students looking forward to the 2009 Decathlon and learning from our experiences, they intend to do even better next time around.”

“This is truly a multidisciplinary project and provides a great opportunity for our students from the College of ACES to get actively involved with the team in areas such as indoor environmental control, construction, efficient energy and water usage,” said Xinlei Wang, professor of agricultural engineering in the U of I College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. “The biggest challenge for this second year of competition is to win more contests than last year and achieve better standing in the overall competition.”

The purpose of the competition is to educate the student participants about renewable energy and energy efficiency and to challenge them to think in new ways about energy; to raise public awareness energy efficient technologies; and to help move solar energy technologies to the marketplace faster. The student competition is a way to push the research and development.

This is the fourth Solar Decathlon – the first being held in 2002. This year’s teams willl come from universities in the United States, Spain, Canada, and Germany. For a complete listing of the institutions in the 2009 competition, sponsors, and other information, visit http://www.solardecathlon.org/.