Slashdot Mirror
German Team Wins 2009 Solar Decathlon
An anonymous reader writes "Our team recently competed in the 2009 US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon. The Solar Decathlon is a 2-year competition that challenges university students from 20 US and international teams to design, build, and operate the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered house. Objective scores are based on comfort control, appliance performance, net-metering, and home entertainment. Subjective contest scores are determined by juries that weigh the engineering design, architectural design, as well as marketing and communication strategies. Team Germany took 1st place due to a large net production of electricity, while Team California claimed top honors in the Architecture contest. Minnesota won the engineering design section. However, looking beyond the contest winners, the main purpose of the event is to raise awareness about solar technology and sustainable design. As part of this campaign, products used in all 20 homes are listed on the DOE website. The most exciting aspect is that the construction and engineering documents and communication materials from all teams are open-sourced for anyone to use or modify!"
The most exciting aspect is that the construction and engineering documents and communication materials from all teams are open-sourced for anyone to use or modify!
... they have chosen a proper "IP-format" to avoid patent trolls to grab ideas in order to 'protect' them.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Photovoltaic maybe, but solar thermal is wholly ready now and efficient for the average home owner, especially evacuated tubes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_collector#Evacuated_tube
A few racks of those on the roof, when coupled with a passive haus, which can be built with 5% cost of a normal house, would probably cover a 95% of normal household's heating/hot_water needs with no major electric/natural_gas/oil backup required, even in the mild climates such as the north-east states:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
Even in Canada, there seem to be projects revolving around that type of thing:
http://www.dlsc.ca/how.htm
Photovoltaic is what, 15-30% at best? Solar Thermal can be up to 90% and evacuated tubes are pretty cheap now.
I'm very happy to see this kind of competition however from a scientific prospective i see some problem: saying you save co2 with solar energy is a bit "gross", first to produce all those solar panels you had to pollute the environment so the first question someone should ask is : ok solar is good but how much do you pollute to produce one flat panel ? Are we sure the pollution made (and i'm not speaking only about amount of CO2 but also toxic in rivers, sea etc. etc. ) to make a solar panel is less than the one we would make to make the same power from "classic" method ? CO2 savings: well this is just ridiculous: a nuclear reactor, a wind reactor, a carbon fuel power plant, a hydroelectric power plant. 4 ways of getting electricity, four different amount of Co2 produced, so from what kind of power plant does your electricity come, this is how you try to figure out your real "co2 savings" . Next thing to speak about should the fact that our pollution doesn't come only from Co2 but from toxic wastes too, so measuring pollution with Co2 is ineffective and misleading. I really DO care for my planet and sometimes looks like all this "environmental talks" are just exscuses to push new products rather than really doing something to make earth a better place for our future generations but I might be wrong .
I'm waiting for the nuclear heptaluge.
PV is totally accessible to the homeowner who has a clue. Yes, I do expect everyone to be able to wire a PV system. Specialization is for Insects... plus, it's stupidly simple to wire PV. And if you can't figure out house wiring as an adult, you deserve to be electrocuted. You can trivially find solar panels under $3/watt. If you control your consumption, you can save absurd amounts of money. Buy a chest fridge (or add a thermostat to a chest freezer to make it a fridge) and stop heating your whole house unnecessarily (do you really need to walk around naked in the whole thing?) and you can typically save a huge percentage of your energy budget. And since most people are grid-tied, they can do without batteries. PG&E, at least, will install a time-of-use meter for free. The only really expensive part is involving an electrical contractor for the service disconnect.
Thermal is cool when you need heat, but when you need electricity it's a horribly inefficient way to go for small systems. And let's face it, we all use electricity. I realize that a lot of people are out on the street right now and not in a position to build much of anything, but for the rest of us, cutting back on nonessentials and living further within our means is enough. You don't have to build a solar system all at once, the job is easy enough to where any basically healthy adult ought to be able to do it, and to claim otherwise is to make excuses. How many times have you helped someone with a computer problem and found the problem in the help right where it ought to be, only to have the user say "If I knew it was that easy, I would have done it myself!" Well, why didn't you look in the help, you lazy fucko? The same is true of the basic skills in wiring needed for a PV installation.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Go to the teams site e.g. http://www.solardecathlon.org/2009/team_germany.cfm
On the bottom right are the zip files. They contain the complete technical drawings.
What more do you want? If you want to build the exact same thing, you'll probably still need an architect. But hey, you also need a IT guy for installing bind.
Cool, on page 419 they describe how they moved the house from Darmstadt to Washington DC. So that's your blueprint for stealing it!
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Did you really mean "stupid people's village" or did you actually mean Düsseldorf?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Computer with no modems / routers listed as well tv's with no cable / sat boxes listed as well.
Nice way to miss needed parts to the Products.
Congrats to the team! What TFS doesn't say, is that TU Darmstadt won this competition for the 2nd time in a row.
Our research center was involved in the energy system design for the 2007 edition, but TU Darmstadt failed to mention it anywhere.
Nice to see that they achieved to win without screwing anyone this time!
40%, but they're quite viable. From Emcore, you can get 1MW for 2-3 USD per watt which is competitive with all solar cell technology (but it's probably not for a single home, and it's better off for use in, say, desert area with low cloud cover and shadowing).
$/watt is pretty much standard across the whole PV industry though. But I agree with you, I don't see a great future in photovoltaic technology, I think solar-thermal is far more promising. Typically what they do is concentrate the solar energy on simple NaCl (salt) which melts it, then it runs into a water pool which generates steam to turn turbines (the only novel technology is concentrating the light which is pathetically easy, and possibly using trackers to ensure max incident light). The benefit is that is even generates power at night. The drawback is that I don't think it can be scaled down for individual use, and it's not something easily adapted to space application. From Wikipedia, it looks like it's about 2-3 orders of magnitude cheaper than PV
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Ever consider that both solar and the burning of fossil fuels result in pollution that are both ongoing cost?
You manufacture a solar panel and then use it for X years to get as much energy as you can. When the solar panel is discarded, you effectively paid "z" pollution (during manufacturing) for the "X" years of energy.
Alternatively, if you had used a coal-burning power plant, the energy of those "X" years would have required the burning of coal and generating "y" amount of pollution.
If you want to have energy for "2X" years, then you need either two sets of solar panel (with "2z" pollution) or two loads of coal ("2y" pollution).
Your solar panel isn't going to last forever.
If you're an accountant or have a business degree, then for tax purposes, you may differentiate between "one-time-cost" and "ongoing cost".
However, in the end, they are really the same. Only good thing about solar is the pollution cost may be comparatively better than coal.
But don't kid yourself that there is only a one-time cost.
The "one-time cost" doesn't truly exist for anything in this world.
If only the football team could manage this kind of production....
Unfortunately, unless we pass a law that eliminates the ability of Home Owner Associations to deny approval for solar energy devices, these are not likely to become widespread.
Mod parent up! touchy moderators....
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Solar thermal can be up to 90% efficient? Have you heard of the laws of thermodynamics and Carnot efficiency? The average power plant peaks at about 60-65% efficient.
Sure, right now photovoltaics are only 15-30% for system efficiency, thats system, not just the cells. But PV is not restrained by the Carnot efficiency because it is not a heat engine. More demand = more research = better cells. Just look at the space grade cells and PV concentrator cells. World record right now is about 43% efficient.
I viewed these houses over four different days, from construction to display. .: Germany ... equipment.
Among the top contenders, some equipment was obviously German,
Bosch Dishwashers and German refrigerators for most every top contender.
Others viewing these solar houses often asked where to get some equipment on the top houses.
Solar cells: Germany
Heat exchanger: Germany
Kitchen equipment: Germay
. .
While some contest categories like architecture couldn't rely on German equipment,
this solar house contest seemed like the post WWII race for the best space program
-- who had the better German scientists, USSR or US with Werner von Braun.
Amongst these houses, who had the better German solar, heating, kitchen,
A couple years ago, Germany produced half the world's solar power.
While one can laud Germany, one must take note that the U.S. has bowed out of much science, technology, and the education of them (except biology, medicine, computers, and military equipment).
All the women and men on the German Team prodded the audience
and answered questions like engineers
-- a half Carribean, half German woman answered questions in contrasts
that signaled her engineering mind.
In contrast, the Virginia Tech team seemed lackadaisical
lounging around, ignorant about many aspects of their own house
-- was the Virginia Tech team just there to party?
In front of their TVs and computers, in their cars and trains,
with four times the population of Germany,
half the U.S. badmouths science and the striving for its knowledge (elitism).
Still, from wherever energy generation and usage technology comes, we are thankful.
The German house used phase-changing materials to dampen energy fluctuations,
a couple types of solar cells including some for shaded areas,
and was the only house with a second livable level.
Another house could electrically dim its windows.
The University of Illinois Urbana Champaign house sealed its doors like a commercial freezer.
One house changed one wall's colors according to cool or warm temperatures.
Thank you, scientists.
Take a look at the home page for the European counterpart of this contest:
http://www.sdeurope.org/index.php/eng/PARTICIPATING-TEAMS
Count carefully, and you find only 19 finalists, and not 20. Why? Because the 20th was from Ariel University Center, an Israeli university located in a settlement:
http://spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=6022
Somebody made some noise, and they got disqualified from the contest on political reasons (just like Leonid Levin's Ph.D. in 1972 Soviet Russia).
I can't comment on the AUC team's chance of winning, but I can comment on the sheer stupidity of ignoring scientific work because you dislike the political leanings of its authors.
I agree. I believe that solar is on the cusp of becoming 'cool' in California. If that happens, I expect these kinds of rules/laws to be struck down.
A couple days before the final scores, Team California was first.
Their house remains far better looking than Team Germany's or UIUC, which was a box whose white outside on barn wood looked like a chapped child who spent too much time outdoors.
See
http://www.solardecathlon.org/scoring/
where Team California has a much better architecture (it was beautiful, comfortable, spacious), which is the main observation one sees onsite. UIUC won only on the two ratings of "comfort zone" and "net metering", which we tourists didn't notice onsite.
I found the engineers of UIUC more talkative than those of Team California. For example, UUIC asked if two miles of wiring in the German house was a reasonable approach to a long-term robust house.
And they mentioned that there is an industry that converts old barns to wood for new buildings.
We have all heard how UIUC excels in many fields.
I wouldn't consider Team California's Santa Clara University a top tier school; nonetheless, they produced a more beautiful and architecturally intricate solar house.
UIUC was an engineer's house;
Team California's was a house regular folks would want.