WASHINGTON
Solar power, still a tiny fraction of the energy used today, may be heading closer to the mainstream if a display on the National Mall over the past week is any indication.
Twenty universities brought solar homes to Washington, assembled them in the shadow of the Washington Monument and became a weeklong magnet for people wanting to see what these technology-filled homes were all about. To many visitors, they no longer looked like oddball experiments, but dwellings that had the look and feel although smaller of houses in suburbia.
Even storm clouds and drizzle didn’t keep the curious from standing in long lines one afternoon to look at the one-bedroom homes that had been assembled by students from 16 states, Puerto Rico and three foreign countries.
As the rain fell, batteries hidden beneath attached decks and porches provided the juice from energy that had been absorbed on sunny days.
Judges ranked each of the houses on 10 criteria, from architecture to market viability to engineering to livability. They required students to wash clothes, prepare meals, run a television, maintain comfortable temperatures and even use excess power to drive a plug-in electric car and finish the week having used no more electricity than the sun provided.
A team of students from Germany’s Technische Universitat Darmstadt won the weeklong competition as judges concluded their box-like dwelling was the most efficient, well-designed and well-engineered home in the competition. It featured three walls of solar cell-imbedded louvers that were adjusted automatically by a computer to best take advantage of the sun.
