September 2, 2007

Last year’s battle

Teams from 20 universities have spent the summer building enough homes for an entire solar village. The off-grid, self-powering homes will be on display for 10 days in October on the National Mall in Washington D.C., competing in the Department of Energy’s 2007 Solar Decathlon.

The point of the competition is not to create new building technologies. Entrants have to use commercially available products to prove that their sun-powered home can be commercially reproduced. For Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) university with its access to super-efficienct, NASA-grade solar panels, that was a disadvantage.…