High Performance Home Design Market Study #2

The Solar Decathlon is a DOE-sponsored international competition which challenges collegiate teams to design, build, and operate solar powered houses that are cost-effective and energy-efficient. These competition homes are highly visible and typically see more than a quarter of a million visitors. Through a partnership with a university team, SCE will provide the competing team with strategic technical design assistance, stressing the importance of key DSM practices such as Loading Order, Zero Net Energy, Grid-Tied Distributed Generation and Net Energy Metering. In turn, these activities will allow SCE to extract rich market intelligence on the latest EE/DR/DG technologies.

The Solar Decathlon is a an international competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that challenges up to 20 collegiate teams to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy-efficient, and attractive. i These competition homes are highly visible and typically see more than 60,000 visitors per year. The 2013 Solar Decathlon Competition—held at the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, California—created a remarkable opportunity for Southern California Edison (SCE) to engage with customers on subjects such as energy-efficiency (EE), demand response (DR), and distributed generation (DG). Through a partnership, SCE provided strategic technical design assistance and on-site building diagnostics to a team in the competition composed of students from Southern California Institute of Architecture and California Institute of Technology (SCI-Arc/Caltech). Because the competition is every other year (biennially), the long timeline allows for ample guidance from concept to finished product. SCE’s assistance emphasized the importance of best practices within construction and key demand-side management (DSM) practices, including loading order, zero net energy (ZNE), grid-tied DG, and net energy metering (NEM). In turn, these activities allowed SCE to extract rich market intelligence on the latest EE/DR/DG technologies and practices. The SCI-Arc/Caltech Solar Decathlon 2013 house, called Dynamic Augmented Living Environment (DALE), was a test of reconfigurable components. Specifically, DALE featured a novel approach with controllable modules to maximize control of indoor comfort with reduced energy usage. The end goal was to test several technologies involved in passive thermal control as part of a ZNE residential home. In addition to the outreach that occurred during the competition, findings from this home and partnership were documented and shared with various utility-administered energy-efficiency programs.