|
Standing among a bustling crowd in September, Lucas Dixon watched thousands of people filter through the 900-square-foot, solar-powered homes exhibited at the National Mall in Washington.
Dixon knew he did not want to be just an observer of this competition but rather a participant of a project that transcends the idea of winning.
“It was watching the 250,000 people who went through the houses that week and knowing this was such a large-scale project,” he said. “That was my defining moment.”
Dixon, a junior in political science, and about 10 other students, comprise the Ohio State team selected from more than 100 international applicants by the U.S. Department of Energy to compete in its biannual Solar Decathlon. In September 2009, 20 teams will present their energy-efficient houses – powered entirely by solar energy – in Washington for two weeks.
Building this house is important to Dixon because it is a proactive solution to the looming energy crisis, he said.
“It’s about being young and being optimistic and being frustrated with the negative news,” he said. “I wanted to do something to work at finding solutions.”
According to a DOE press release, the Solar Decathlon is part of the President’s Solar America Initiative, “which seeks to make solar power cost-competitive with conventional forms of electricity by 2015.”
But Dixon and Kurtis Meyer, a junior in environmental and natural resources, had to work throughout autumn quarter to earn OSU a spot in this international project. The two students, who are now co-project leaders, created the Sustainability Team as an organizational tool to receive basic funding and gather students to write a proposal for the project, Dixon said.
As selected competitors, team members are now preparing to design, build and market their solar-powered house. Lead faculty adviser Mark Walter said courses are being designed in which students’ projects will construct some aspect of the house.
Adjunct faculty adviser, Keoni Fleming, is teaching an architecture course spring quarter that will require students to create designs of OSU’s solar powered house, Walter said. The decathlon team will select one of those designs to submit for their preliminary design deadline in June.
“There are two parts to the course,” he said. “One part will have senior architecture students working towards a goal of having one design at the end of the quarter. The other portion is the support portion, which includes looking at some of the engineering technologies, developing marketing strategies adding outreach activities, and doing fundraising.”
In previous competitions, James DeFrance, a freshman in engineering physics and team compliance lead, said previous participants have built houses with a variety of materials from cargo boxes to bricks.
The solar-power requirement leaves members with a wide array of methods to energize their house, DeFrance said.
“This means we can take the sun’s energy to make electricity, or we can heat water using other solar tubes, which then we can use the hot water for things including running an AC,” he said. “Also, you can use passive thermal methods.”
To fund these developments, Walter said the team budgeted $500,000 in their proposal. The team is looking to Ohio energy conservation companies such as Green Energy Ohio and Simply Living to finance most of its plans. The DOE, however, gave each team $100,000 to help project the team’s influence beyond the actual members.
“Two further goals of the Department of Energy are for teams to integrate competition topics into curricula and to do outreach,” Walter said.
For the outreach requirement, Dixon said the team is planning on setting up an exhibit at COSI to highlight energy efficiency practices and working with Metro High School, a Columbus public high school that specializes in science and technology.
“We’re hoping to work with a younger generation by bringing students in the house while it’s still in production,” Dixon said. “We want to teach a couple hundred kids and give them a detailed example of energy efficiency.”
In September, OSU will be competing against four or five other Big Ten teams, Walter said. Germany, Spain and Canada are other contestants.
About 10 people wrote the proposal during autumn quarter, but DeFrance said the group is looking to expand in the coming months. Any student interested in working with OSU’s team can contact them through its Web site, osusolardec.org.
Although OSU’s decathlon members will work for the next 14 months hoping to win, DeFrance said their mission extends beyond claiming first place.
“We want to produce a house that is more livable and more normal than the average competition house,” he said. “We actually want to sort of meet the whole goal of the competition, which is how the average American can live in a green energy home.”
Allison D’Aurora can be reached at [email protected].
