It's a statistic that the Department of Energy likes to hammer home: Forty percent of energy in America is consumed in homes and buildings, more than what is used by either transportation or industry. That number is the primary reason for the DOE’s Solar Decathlon contest, a biannual competition on the National Mall that calls on groups of college students worldwide to meet a simple (or at least simple-sounding) challenge: with two years and $100,000, construct a fully operational house powered by nothing but the sun. There is only one winner each year, judged on more than a dozen criteria, from comfort to market viability, who receives substantial bragging rights. (Story continued below...)
The contest, which began in 2002, is a sign of an important shift. Since the mid-1970s, the task of figuring out how to use energy in the future has fallen to the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado and the handful of other DOE labs around the country. But a climate bill up for debate by the Senate would substantially shift incentives, rewarding private-sector thinkers for coming up with new ways not just to create energy, but to maximize its effiency. Energy Secretary Steven Chu thinks that government labs and public universities will always be valuable research centers, but that the ingenuity of innovative thinkers who don't work for the government will shape the future. During a break from touring the new batch of Solar Decathlon homes, Chu sat down with NEWSWEEK's Daniel Stone. Excerpts:
What impresses you most about these students' housing designs? To have students get into the idea of doing something that stretches their ingenuity is ultimately good for everybody. I would hazard to guess that projects like these have more educational value than your standard class.
What does it mean that these enhanced innovative models have begun to come from private people—from students and people outside of government labs?What it means is that we're going to have another generation of engineers who can actually design things. Housing of the future is going to be very high tech, things that take full advantage of sensors and technology and computers. We've seen it in cars, how computers are constantly tuning up the car, deciding what the engine needs, when you fire the spark plug, or how much fuel you need. But you can really go to town on a house. As we begin to look at what you can actually do both in the home and in the business in terms of managing energy use and efficiency, and even having design tools, you can imagine, within five years or even less, having tools for buildings that have automatic energy analysis embedded in [them] to calculate energy use for you.
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