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Engineers and architects join forces to create a completely livable solar home. By Melanie Bush
“We are on a quest for victory,” says Tim Fu ’04 ME, M.Eng. ’05, the driving force behind Cornell’s involvement. “As soon as I heard about it, I said, let’s put in a proposal. I liked the idea of applying environmental activism to technology and to the real world. It’s pretty clear that the U.S. expects to have energy problems, as the war in Iraq shows. Redirecting our long-term goals is what sparked my interest.” The Solar Decathlon is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) and its National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), as well as private organizations and corporations including the American Institute of Architects, the National Association of Home Builders, BP, and Home Depot. It is the hope of sponsors that today’s students—tomorrow’s engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, and homeowners—will incorporate energy efficiency and solar energy into their professional and personal lives. The contest also serves to raise public awareness of renewable energy and energy efficiency and to encourage the U.S. to move solar technologies more quickly into the marketplace. NREL’s Cecile Warner led the team that designed the ten categories in the Decathlon competition: Architecture, Dwelling, Documentation, Communications, Comfort Zone, Appliances, Hot Water, Lighting, Energy Balance, and Getting Around. “Our biggest fear was that it wouldn’t be interesting to the public—we were wrong about that!” (The first exhibition in 2002 hosted over 100,000 visitors.) The Department of Energy provides $5000 in seed money to each team, as well as an electric car (to fulfill the “Getting Around” requirement), a low-speed street-legal vehicle to be powered entirely by the solar electric system on each team’s house. “They can get to Home Depot for supplies or up to Capitol Hill to visit their representatives. The point of the car [for the contest] is to show that solar energy has the potential to power every part of our lives, including the cars we drive.” Warner says the Decathlon can help shape the nation’s energy future. “I think one of the important things the contest does is to create this really visible group of new practitioners in building energy, a steady population of passionate people who are being snapped up by the building industry.” The Cornell University Solar Decathlon (CUSD) team consists of more than 70 graduate and undergraduate decathletes from various academic backgrounds, primarily architecture, engineering, and business. Many of the students feel that CUSD represents a kind of proactive involvement that is more effective than political protest. Among the goals laid out in the team’s mission statement are “to create a self-sustaining solar living system designed to exceed the expectations of the Solar Decathlon competition; to maximize our positive impact on humanity by encouraging sustainability in scientific, social, economic, and political contexts; and to educate industry, academia, legislators, and ourselves about sustainable living systems and strategies.” CUSD’s subteams, each dedicated to different parts of the ten contests, seem fully capable of implementing these goals. The project is entirely student-run, with faculty involved only as advisers. “It’s better this way,” says Jesse Stolow ’04, an applied economics and management major who led the CUSD business team in raising the estimated $300,000 needed to design, build, and transport the house to D.C. “The students have a much stronger involvement—we’re making our own curriculum. We’re setting our own standards. In the more traditional approach, a professor decides what you should learn; here, we’re doing something that’s never been done before.” Students from each discipline are building the house’s systems, spending countless hours together asking questions and teaching one another. Each category of the competition is managed by team leaders, who ensure that work is proceeding smoothly. “With this level of commitment, giving academic credit for CUSD was a great idea,” says Stolow. Engineering students are able to sign up for CUSD as a three-credit-per-semester elective in mechanical and aerospace engineering; architects took a Solar Decathlon design studio for six credits, with a two-credit follow-up class (the architectural design component of the project is now completed). Nick Rajkovich, a visiting lecturer, is one of the current faculty advisers from the Department of Architecture. He feels that students are getting invaluable real-life experience with CUSD. “Other than the scale of the project, which is relatively small, it’s like professional practice—resolving conflicts that come up in design, coordinating construction issues—all things you can talk about in classes but you can’t really understand until you go through them. To my mind, this experience is much more intense than a regular architecture studio because here you actually get to build the project. I went to Cornell as an undergrad and I wish I’d gotten to do that.” Zellman Warhaft, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, has been CUSD’s engineering adviser since the beginning. “From my point of view it’s been a lot of fun. Architecture and engineering are two very different disciplines; engineers are more involved in the mechanics of how things work, specifying the performance of different parts of a system, whereas architects tend to think more holistically, concerning themselves with how a project blends into the environment, say, or how it can be used at a later date. What CUSD is doing is making students on both sides appreciate each other as doing equally valid work. They’re learning to accept different viewpoints within a complex design process, which is important because these interactions are necessary in the professional world, and people coming out of programs are generally not prepared for this.”
What about Cornell’s famous rivalry between architects and engineers, best exemplified by Dragon Day? For the annual spring event, first-year architects construct a huge dragon to parade around campus while engineering students traditionally counterattack—spectacularly in 2002 when the tower crane on the Engineering Quad for Duffield Hall construction was used to fly a huge phoenix in the face of the approaching dragon. “It’s clear there’s still a culture of competition,” say Fu, “but once people feel a sense of ownership for the project they tend to forget their previous notions.” “We’ve come to learn,” says Stephanie Horowitz ’05 Arch, “that each discipline must really understand the requirements and constraints of the other disciplines. If I tell an engineer that he has five feet for a closet, but he needs six feet to fit an air handler or an electronic panel, we try to compromise in a way that produces something superior. CUSD is extremely different from any class I’ve ever taken—it’s more like a part-time or sometimes a full-time job. I’ve known since high school that I want to work in sustainable design, so I feel that this is a bridge between my academic and professional careers.” The need to transport the house 400 miles from Ithaca to Washington, D.C., has added a design requirement usually only present in manufactured or modular homes (the CUSD house more closely resembles the latter). The house is being built directly on a chassis, which will be trucked down the highway by a transporter, then jacked up and set down on the Mall. “The need for transportation had a pretty extreme effect on the design,” says Horowitz, “because we needed to strip it down to road-size limits of 14 feet wide and 40 feet long. Once we get to the Mall we only have three or four days to assemble the house, and it was just not in our vocabulary to do that without the chassis.” Other teams are doing more of the construction right at the Mall and one team—from Madrid—will be shipping their house across the Atlantic. “All in all we decreased the interior space—what we call the heated footprint—to 650 feet out of the allowed 800 feet, which also allows us more flexibility in designing other elements,” Horowitz continues. “For example, we’re raising the outside landscape to the two-foot-high finished floor of the house. So, in some ways, we are going beyond the demands of the competition while in others we are very constrained by them.” For Tim Fu, the head engineer, the solar electric system was the hardest part to design. “Photovoltaic electricity is such a new field; the other major systems—mechanical and plumbing—are not. We had to design the lighting, wiring, and control panels to meet building codes, and since we don’t have that skill set, we’ve had to consult people in industry.” Fu continues, “We had to understand, for example, electrical components, division of circuits, where you can place outlets. This was also probably the most fun part, talking to so many people who wanted to help. A local engineer, Ian Shapiro of Taitem Engineering in Ithaca, was very helpful. We’re also talking with PDC [Cornell’s own department of Planning, Design and Construction] about reviewing our drawings and helping with construction. The best part of the project will be actually building the house.” The HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) team, which designed the house’s other two major systems—mechanical and plumbing—is led by biological engineering major Jordan Goldman ’04, M.Eng. ’05. “Our primary goal was to make these systems as energy efficient as possible while keeping them economically feasible for the consumer,” Goldman says. “We’ve incorporated an ultra-efficient air source heat pump with a variable-speed air handler and a custom-designed energy recovery ventilator. These three pieces in conjunction will satisfy the heating and cooling needs of the house while meeting the highest indoor air quality standards. We’ve also designed a gray water tank, which will collect water from the shower, washing machine, and bathroom sink for reuse as irrigation water for the landscape. ” “Also important is our design’s versatility,” adds Jesse Stolow. “Our house can integrate itself into any solar environment, from sunny Los Angeles to cloudy Ithaca, because the panels can be positioned at any angle and the cladding can be made of almost any material—wood, aluminum, crushed cans. These things go beyond the contest requirements, but we think that presenting it as completely livable makes it more valuable.” The team also hopes their house will find a permanent home after the competition. “We met with President Lehman last week to discuss our options,” says Fu. “Maybe it can be visiting faculty housing or an exhibit, so Cornell and the public can appreciate our legacy.
NREL’s Warner also feels hopeful about the future of solar power in America. “The National Association of Homebuilders just did a study of the long-term potential of solar homes in the U.S.,” she says, “and they predict that with incentives in place, solar will have a 20 percent market share by 2025. That’s just new starts, so that represents a lot of housing. We’re very excited that industry has solar on its screen—if it wasn’t going to be lucrative, they wouldn’t be interested.” There is no reliable estimate of how many solar houses exist in the U.S. today; the Solar Energy Industries Association says the closest gauge is the number of solar panels purchased. In this the U.S. lags far behind other industrialized countries: Its demand for panels has remained about level since 1996 while other nations’ consumption has skyrocketed. Government incentives have stimulated solar panel sales elsewhere, Warner said, but what is important is to keep an eye on the future. “All you have to do is look at Japan, where there are 55,000 solar houses being built per year, or at Europe, with 20,000. These countries have long-range energy planning.” Although the CUSD team has made consumer affordability a goal determining all of their choices, a project of this magnitude could not have been tackled by the group without monetary and material sponsors. “As soon as I heard about the project,” says Jesse Stolow, “being a business student, I thought: They’re going to have to raise money. That was a challenge, thinking, how am I going to raise $300,000?” The business team implemented a coordinated marketing effort including a website, brochures, and press releases, to stimulate public giving, and Stolow estimates they have so far raised over $150,000 in monetary and material help. “We started fundraising in spring ’04. The subteams brought us lists of companies they wanted materials from; we did a direct campaign to businesses and got a great response. GE, for example, has agreed to donate all of the photovoltaic panels, plus a couple of the large kitchen appliances, an astronomical cash value. A lot of the money came from alums.” CUSD is already giving back to the local community. The Outreach team, headed by Melissa Wrolstad ’06 ME, has spent the past year developing programs with local partner schools in Ithaca, encouraging teachers to make sustainable energy a permanent part of their curricula. In Spring ’04, the Outreach team helped students at Dewitt Middle School build small solar houses, made a three-day presentation on passive and active solar concepts to sixth-grade science students at Boynton Middle School, and led a class on solar energy at Enfield Elementary. “The science teachers are so excited,” said Wrolstad. “They can’t wait to have us back.” Next semester, Outreach hopes to arrange field trips for kids to tour the completed house. “We don’t just want to win this competition; we want to have an impact on the whole world,” says Stolow. “Every aspect of our design is centered on the idea that this house can be used in everyday life. We’d like to win because that will prove what we’re doing is right, but deep down we know we’re right anyway.” Melanie Bush is a freelance writer living in Ithaca. |
THIS year a Cornell group is proud to be a contender in the second Solar Decathlon, which challenges colleges and universities around the globe to research, design, and build a house that most spectacularly embodies the advantages of solar energy. In October, 18 teams will exhibit their finished houses in Washington, D.C., where they will construct a “solar village” on the National Mall, open to the public and judged on ten categories (hence “decathlon”). Although the exhibition stage gets the most attention, students have been intensely absorbed for the past two years with fundraising and planning, and the design and construction of their homes. 
