And because just doing it is not enough, we can vote for the one we like best. Old-school, you can vote on paper, right there in one of several tents at the Solar Decathlon, but you can also exercise your American Idol-learned skills and text your vote, one vote per cell phone allowed. It just wouldn't be a bona fide event without a competition.
Outside the Team Boston house, by Boston Architectural College and Tufts University, Ross was a seemingly indefatigable font of enthusiastic data: a 120-gallon water tank whose contents are heated by a solar thermal system; rooftop solar panels whose units work in parallel, so that each one operates independently and each has a micro-inverter that converts DC power into AC, so units can be added if a homeowner can afford, say, only 1 kW at first, and each one's function can be monitored; a monitoring system that tracks energy use real-time.
People ask Ross a hundred questions, including what happens if the house doesn't use all the power produced. It just gets sold right back to the grid, he explains, and you get the money. Of course, he says, you might be paying 20 cents/kWh to the utility and they might just pay you 5 cents for what you sell back. (The net metering question was a popular one.)
The project's web site puts the construction cost at $450,000 to $650,000, but Ross said the house cost $300,000 and has already been sold to a developer for that amount. The Solar Today blog says the sale was to a Cape Cod company with plans to develop a community sponsored by the non-profit Housing Assistance Corp. Affordability is apparently the aim of a number of the entries this year, to show that solar technologies get closer to the real world. This house and others, like the University of Minnesota's and Team Ontario's, also demonstrate that solar houses can work in the North.
In a presentation late Sunday afternoon, Bradley Collins of the American Solar Energy Society and Solar Today magazine talked about the solar industry's prospects, working in the field and more. He got questions about finding work in the sector, and he got a question about the confidence people should have in it, given the history of a big boom in the 70s followed by a total crash.
Not to worry, Collins said. "You'll find the environment is different," he said, in what appeared to be chararacteristic understatement. "This is big business." GE, BP, Kyocera, Sanyo ... these companies and more are in it. The history is not going to repeat itself. Asked about cost, he said the manufacturing cost has gone down 30-40% in the last 18 months, mostly because it's a buyer's market. The housing depression has dampened demand, as has overspending and subsequent pullbacks on subsidies in Europe.
Collins also said he didn't see any breakthrough technology on the near horizon -- nothing that will be "game-changing." (Not that something completely unforeseen couldn't happen, he allowed.) The only possibility, he said, was technology to massively increase the productivity of each photovoltaic unit so that it would excite several electrons instead of just one: this breakthrough would slash the production costs from 18 cents/kWh to 6 cents, he said. Researchers have said achieving this level of advancement to commercial viability would take $1 billion over 10 years, and, he said, it would be worth it.
In the meantime, solar decathlons may continue, although if installations take off into the commercial big-time DOE might have to come up with a new challenge.
