SHORELINE, Wash.
Mike Nelson stood in his new office, where walls of corrugated metal clash just a tad with silky-smooth floors and walls of sustainably harvested eucalyptus.
“Very soon, the old ways are going,” Nelson, director of the Northwest Solar Center, told visitors. “The old ways are dying.”
Nelson’s office is the solar-powered Zero Energy House at Shoreline Community College, which is intended to produce as much energy as it uses.
The tale behind the house stretches to Eastern Washington and all the way back to Washington, D.C.
It all started in 2002 when Mat Taylor’s students at Washington State University in Pullman started talking about building a solar-powered home to enter in the U.S. Energy Department’s Solar Decathlon.
Students from the WSU schools of architecture, civil engineering, interior design and construction management transformed a hand-sized sketch into the Zero Energy House. They disassembled it and transported it to the National Mall in Washington for the 2005 competition.
“It’s 100 percent student-built,” Taylor, an architecture professor, told visitors at a dedication ceremony. “That’s what I’m most proud of.”
