Help Wanted: The Solar Decathlon

The US Department of Energy has announced it doesn't want to run the Solar Decathlon anymore, and the agency is seeking an appropriate group, or more likely a consortium of groups, to take charge and administer the solar house contest.  More information is here.

The 2009 Solar Decathlon on the National Mall in Washington. Public domain.

Of interest is the fact that DOE will award $3,000,000-4,000,000 to the winning Administrator, plus the winner is required to provide a 50% cost share.  This reveals what it costs to put on the contest. 

In The Solar House I detailed some of the exciting contributions of the Decathlon, and some of the criticism.  I admire the creativity and hard work of the students.  And I admire that the contest requires student-architects and student-engineers to work together*.  I am critical of the contest for a number of reasons.  First, because the projects (one-bedroom and about 800-square feet) generally cost $2,000,000 or more; this isn't a good lesson for any student and a huge burden on the universities (see: Too Expensive: The Solar Decathlon).  Second, the requirement that the houses be transportable is basically wrong, because a solar house with any kind of passive aspirations needs to be heavy, with lots of thermal mass.  And here on the blog I've complained that holding the contest in the mild climate of Southern California in October isn't very challenging.  See: The Solar Decathlon: Back to Irvine. 

What does it mean that the DOE doesn't want to run the Solar Decathlon anymore?  It certainly could mean the beginning of an exciting new era.  It will be interesting to see who will be willing to commit such a large amount of resources to take on this job.  Hopefully some group (USGBC?) will step forward with a bunch of bold new ideas to reinvent the contest and reinvigorate the solar house movement.  I have some suggestions for the future of the contest:

• Set reasonable spending limits based on Norwich University's: "The Most Affordable Solar Decathlon House. Ever." (pdf)
• Build a permanent neighborhood each time, and donate the houses to real people in need. Alternatively, schools could build a permanent home in their home location.
• Hold the contest in challenging weather conditions (maybe Minneapolis in November as I mentioned in the link above) in order to emphasize passive solar heating and superinsulation.
• Measure the homes' energy use with real occupants.  Ask the students to address user behavior, which is a huge difference-maker in home energy use.
• Measure carbon footprint, including embodied energy.
• Promote multi-family housing rather than detached homes.

These are bigger ideas, and most of them are not workable within the DOE's solicitation, which specifies that future Decathlons occur, like the previous ones, at a common park-like location, with 20 temporary freestanding houses.  Still, I offer these ideas with the hope that others may be thinking about how to breathe new life into the Decathlon by transforming it.

I fear, however, that the DOE announcement simply means that the Solar Decathlon has jumped the shark.  Suppose a for-profit industry group wins the contract administer the contest.  Earlier I asked why so many top universities want to participate in such a naked promotional effort for the PV industry, and why students are willing to donate their labor to such an effort.  In this scenario, you might argue that the true character of the endeavor would be more clearly revealed.  They could hire the students as PV salespeople.

A quick rough estimate says that the overall cost of the Decathlon is somewhere between $40-50 million, including the costs to the schools.  Since the purpose is to promote the residential use of PV, one must ask: what would be the highest and best use of that amount of money?  For instance, at a rough estimate of $30,000 per installation, $40 million could give solar to 1333 families in their existing homes.  What kind of publicity and education could that produce?

*In 2006 I was told that my own school, the University of Wyoming, couldn't compete in the Solar Decathlon because we do not have architecture students, only engineering, and therefore we would not have an interdisciplinary design team.  Though I wanted my students to compete, I accepted that decision because the rationale was noble.

Too Expensive: The Solar Decathlon

Competing in the Solar Decathlon is now so expensive that Yale University can't afford it. Yale has withdrawn from the 2015 competition, just weeks away, citing problems with fundraising. The total budget for a Solar Decathlon house often exceeds $2 million.* I included a discussion of Decathlon, and the cost issues, in The Solar House.

Of course Yale can afford it; the school's endowment is $23.9 billion (link). Apparently the decision-makers at Yale don't think the Solar Decathlon is a worthy use of that money. I can imagine those conversations, and I can imagine that it's a reasonable decision. In any case, this is certainly a black eye for the Decathlon.

Design for the Yale Solar House (2015) which will apparently remain unbuilt. Public domain.

The 2015 Solar Decathlon occurs October 8-18 at the Orange County Great Park, in Irvine, California. 16 other teams will compete.

As of now, the Yale team's website is still active.

*Counterpoint: Norwich University built "The Most Affordable Solar Decathlon House. Ever." (pdf)

See also:
#SD2015
The Solar Decathlon: Back to Irvine
The “Shading Decathlon”?

Preservation Today: The Big Question

Like most architectural historians, I am a big supporter of the preservation of historic buildings.  I understand the history of preservation, and how the loss of important buildings like Penn Station forged a grass-roots social movement which properly fights against top-down planning and backroom redevelopment deals.

However, there is a growing concern that attitudes (and rules) about preservation may become too strong in the future and crowd out the possibility for new heritage to be created.  In Europe, there is now a discourse about "museumification," which is concerned with cities becoming frozen in time due to preservation restrictions.

Consider Vienna in the 19th century as an example which might shed some light on these issues.  When Vienna developed the famous Ringstrasse in the 1850s-80s, it immediately became a great modern city, "on a par with Paris," as Mark Girouard describes in his classic book Cities and People (1985).

Vienna's Rigstrasse in 1900.  Public Domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

To create the Ringstrasse, Vienna destroyed its medieval city walls, ramparts, and gates.  In other words, in order to modernize and to achieve the high design quality that makes the city so special, Vienna needed to demolish a very important piece of its heritage.  To some extent, Vienna imitated Paris, where Haussmann removed many of the city's medieval neighborhoods.

Could a project like the Ringstrasse be accomplished today?  Probably not.  If it were proposed today, there would be organized protest.  There would be multiple levels of public review and regulatory controls, probably culminating in legal action and years of delay awaiting court proceedings.  In all likelihood, the wall would become a museum of medieval history, or a museum of Vienna's history.  (To be fair, there are some some examples of large-scale urban renewal occurring.  I think of London, in the Docklands, and New York in Atlantic Yards.  Industrial areas seem to evade the scrutiny of preservationists, perhaps because these histories are not quite important enough, or perhaps the overriding value is to clean up pollution.)

Of course we should not wantonly discard historic buildings, structures, or landscapes.  But we should acknowledge and debate the fact that we have evolved a set of attitudes and policies that make it practically impossible to engage in grandiose developments that might make a city great all-at-once, as happened in Vienna in the 19th century. 

Your thoughts?  Please comment!

Is your window "thermally desirable"?

In my research for The Solar House I came upon this statement by a British engineering professor in 1976:

"If during a 24-hr period the incoming heat is greater than the loss, the window is thermally profitable for that day.  Furthermore, if during a year the incoming heat is greater than the loss, the window is thermally desirable.  If overall the window gives a net positive gain, its size should be as large as possible.  Conversely, if the long-term window net gain is negative, its best size is zero.…  On a purely thermal basis there is no optimum intermediate size: The window is either maximum or zero."

The quotation is from Dr. Morris Davies*, an engineer at the University of Liverpool, who was part of a research team that spent about ten years analyzing the performance of the St. George’s School by Emslie Morgan (Wallasey, 1961-62), an immensely interesting building I wrote about in The Solar House.

What an excellent illustration of the difference between scientific optimization and design!  Davies' optimized architecture would typically have an all-glass south wall, and all-solid walls on the east, west, and south.   In my view, this is why computer simulations can contribute to architectural design, but they can not be generative or determinant of architectural design.  Scientific knowledge is one important ingredient in a more complex recipe, and human judgments are essential.

Of course, Davies' position here did not consider that windows have other functions beyond thermal (and he admitted so).  They may be desirable for providing daylight, or views, and they may be undesirable for bringing discomfort due to glare.  St. George’s School did indeed suffer a glare problem, of which Davies was aware.

But even from a purely technical point of view, Davies was wrong.  To focus on annual net gain is too simplistic; it neglects the fact that quite a bit of passive solar heat is collected in afternoons in the Spring and Fall, when it is likely to be unwanted because it causes the building to overheat, depending on the weather and other factors of course.  To make a good window "maximum" is to increase the overheating problem.  Any number of solar house architects learned that lesson the hard way, long before 1976, as I detail in The Solar House. 

Note that overheating does not necessarily imply that the building needs air-conditioning.  Opening some windows may suffice, especially on a swing-season afternoon.  This was most certainly the case in Wallasey.  Still, the solar gains at that time are, for the most part, not beneficial.

Clearly Davies was speaking theoretically, and perhaps he assumed that windows would be shaded at times when the building doesn't need heat.  In practice, shading never works in a theoretically-optimum manner.  Or perhaps he assumed that thermal mass lagtime and carryover effects would effectively redistribute the heat from day to night.  In practice, this is also limited.

Nevertheless, I do enjoy the phrase "thermally desirable," and it wouldn't hurt if most architects adopted a little bit of that mindset when thinking about windows.

*Davies was quoted in Joseph E. Perry, Jr.. “The Wallasey School,” Proceedings of the Conference on Passive Solar Heating and Cooling, 1976.

Previously: Why I care about Building Science

A Paul Siple Quotation

"It would appear that in some cases architects have had a tendency to devote unbalanced attention to style and appearance, much after the fashion of women's hat designers, who strive for the expression of uniqueness until the function of head-cover for protection from weather loses its meaning; and woe be it when such hats are caught out in rain, wind or blizzardy weather."

---Paul Siple, "Climatic Criteria for Building Construction" (1950)
linked here

I love quotations like this, because they demonstrate the distance that developed in the 20th century between the conventions of high architecture and a vernacular approach to building based on well-educated common sense and first principles.  See also: a Reyner Banham quotation from "Stocktaking."  There's a wonderful story to be told about how that distance developed (beginning in earlier centuries).  It should be written by somebody who can be sympathetic to both sides.

Who was Paul Siple?  Today he would be called a climate scientist.  He worked for the military.  He invented the term wind chill factor, and several features in Antarctica are named for him.  See Wikipedia

Siple was closely affiliated with the solar house community.  He attended the 1950 MIT Symposium (which I characterize as "a great summit meeting of solar architects and engineers" in The Solar House), where he gave a paper entitled “Feasibility of Solar Heating Systems.”  Earlier he contributed to the House Beautiful Climate Control Project ("How Many Climates Do We Have in the U.S.?", October 1949).