Decentralized Solar Decathlon

Intended Outcome #1: Greater Educational Impact

• Increase the quality and average duration of each physical and virtual house visit.
• Increase the total number of physical and virtual house visits by the general public, college students, and K-12 students during the competition.
• Increase the volume of high-quality, widely-available educational materials produced by the teams and disseminated by the administrators.

Intended Outcome #2: Greater Workforce Development Impact

• Increase the number of student team members who enter the STEM education field.
• Increase the percentage of student team leaders who work in the building sector after the competition.
• Increase the number of EERE-related companies started by student team members after the competition.

Intended Outcome #3: Greater R&D Impact

• Increase the number and quality of Solar Decathlon-related academic papers and presentations made by participating students and faculty.
• Increase the participation of Solar Decathlon teams in Building America and other federal/state/local government-sponsored EERE programs.
• Increase the number of Solar Decathlon-related patents that are filed within 3 years of the competition evaluation period.

Intended Outcome #4: Greater Market Transformation Impact

• Increase the number of new and/or retrofit residential projects within 20 miles of each participating campus that adopt significant design or physical elements of Solar Decathlon houses.
• Increase the number of homeowners within 20 miles of each participating campus who hire building energy auditors and energy efficiency experts within 1 year of the start of the competition evaluation period.
• Increase the number of media impressions per competition.

Intended Outcome #5: Fewer Adverse Environmental Impacts

• Reduce the emissions attributable to construction, assembly, transportation, team travel, and house visitation travel.
• Reduce the quantity of houses and constituent components that are moved, abandoned, neglected, unused, or discarded during first 12 months after completion of construction.

Other Performance Objectives

• Increase the number of SD2021 team proposals, as compared to SD2015 proposals
• Increase the rate of Solar Decathlon “franchising” by states, regions, and the international community by the end of SD2019.
• Reduce (in real dollars) the size of the prize purse for SD2021, compared to SD2017
• Reduce (in real dollars) the federal funds contribution for SD2021/2023, compared to SD2017/2019.
• Long-term “reach” goal: At least one prototype zero energy home on each of the Power Five conference schools’ campuses by the end of SD2025.

Decentralization removes many of the technical and logistical constraints that severely limited the teams’ design options in the past. A list of new design options follows:

• Climate- and market-responsive designs
• Significantly larger houses
• Permanent foundations
• Diverse geometries
• Multi-level houses
• Diverse construction methods
• High-mass thermal storage strategies
• Site integration.

The yearlong competition introduces the following new opportunities that were impossible or impractical in a 9-day competition:

• Rigorous yearlong performance evaluation under monitored conditions
• Periods of occupancy by members of target market
• Long-term R&D projects
• Long-term education projects
• Long-term outreach strategies.

CDSD believes that every Solar Decathlon team should be required to answer the following high-level research questions by the conclusion of the completion:

• What is the measured yearlong energy balance under typical conditions? Is the measured energy balance within 10% of the predicted energy balance? If not, why not?
• Which elements of the design perform as intended? Which of the most innovative elements have good market potential? Justification your claims and present preliminary commercialization plans.
• Which elements of the design do not perform as intended? Why do they not perform as intended? How can they be modified in future projects so they perform as intended?
• What is the local community’s response to the Solar Decathlon program? What is the local community’s response to the team and its design? Be specific. Collect and present survey, interview, and anecdotal data.

These questions were mostly unanswered during the ’02-’15 Solar Decathlons because of the brief competition period, the budget pressure imposed by the centralized model, and the house characteristics imposed by the centralized model. The reduced administration and team costs; design flexibility; yearlong evaluation; new Livability, R&D, Education, Outreach, Energy Efficiency contests; improved Comfort and Energy Balance contests; and centralized CMS proposed herein virtually guarantee that all the above research questions will be answered by every Solar Decathlon team and all the results will be disseminated for widespread use via the Solar Decathlon website.

The following shorthand notes outline decentralization’s numerous benefits.

1. Administration costs. Decentralization is the only viable concept for accommodating DOE’s reduced project budget. Our proposal is the least risky because we are intimately familiar with the project’s unique challeges and we will not feel pressure to overpromise and under-deliver to meet the budget targets. We also do not face the nearly impossible challenge of attracting unprecedented levels of sponsor funding with an event that has arguably been declining in popularity since the move from the National Mall after 2011.
2. Sponsor opportunities. More relevant target market↔sponsor relationship/connection. Direct exposure to entire campus, instead of <1% of student population.
3. Student interest and engagement. Higher quantity/better quality student involvement. No more “missing the cut” to join the core team at the competition site. Permanent campus facility for future students to use for projects/theses/dissertations. Visible/touchable opportunities for improvement motivate participation in future competitions and increased likelihood of campus “solar villages.”
4. Cost of entry and participation. Lower cost of entry and better ROI for schools leads to more applications and better projects. Better opportunities for prospective team sponsors because of increased exposure to and contact with target market. In the past, it was very difficult to find a house transportation/assembly/disassembly/travel/lodging sponsor because of the disconnect between the team’s needs and potential sponsor’s needs. No house transportation/assembly/disassembly cost, much less team travel/lodging cost, etc.
5. Environmental impact. No house transportation, much less team member travel, much less site visitor travel.
6. Educational, workforce development, R&D, and market transformation impact. Permanent houses in high-traffic locations with diverse audiences over many years creates an environment for people to have valuable and unexpected interactions with the project. This leads to impactful results and opens up future possibilities.
7. Future potential, exciting possibilities. Over the past 2 years, DOE has challenged the community to propose significant, impactful changes to the program that would address increasing budget pressure and declining popularity of the program within and outside of Washington, D.C. Decentralization and its increased use of technology, new storylines, reduced risk, and greater ROI for all stakeholders is the concept that meets DOE’s challenge.
8. New audiences. Investments in new audiences, such as local communities, educators, students, academics, and the uninformed sector of the general public are possible because administrative cost reductions offer the budget flexibility required for to make these investments. Obviously, the National Mall was a very unique centralized competition site, primarily because visitors come to DC to learn and policy-makers reside in DC. No other city offers these benefits. College campuses come the closest.
9. Rewarding the right teams for the right reasons. The quality of the evaluation will be invulnerable to unanticipated circumstances, such as weather systems, power outages, broken truck axles, etc. This is more important than ever before because of the new tiered prize purse model. The pressure on DOE and its program administrator to conduct a fair, compelling competition with rock-solid results will be unprecedented because the stakes are so much higher.
10. Content opportunities. More diverse and interesting photo, video, media, educational, research, feature story, profile, and other content opportunities. The depth, breadth, and quality of printed and online content has inevitably declined in recent years because of general defunding and budget pressures imposed by central site administration requirements.
11. Climate-responsive designs. All buildings, and especially educational/research prototypes, should be designed for the climate in which they are designed to operate during their complete lifecycle. Designing a building for two climates and then evaluating the building in very mild conditions in the less-representative climate is and always has been one of the most problematic elements of the centralized competition. The direct and indirect consequences of this logical disconnect are serious. The decentralized competition immediately puts this issue to rest and opens up numerous new possibilities for the houses that were previously unavailable.
12. Market-responsive designs. See the discussion in the above item. A similar logical disconnect also exists when a building is designed for a particular target market, but is not located, experienced, and evaluated within that target market.
13. Competition more relevant and relatable; no more “abstraction of reality” explanation. Larger houses, permanent foundations, site integration, realistic design/build process, and a yearlong evaluation mean that competition stakeholders no longer have to respond to the competition’s critics on the basis of the competition being “an abstraction of reality” or merely a “demonstration.” By transitioning the competition from “abstraction of reality” to “reality,” the project will gain respect from a range of new stakeholders, such as sponsors, the Building America Program, PV installer training organizations, university researchers, the general public, the academic community, etc.
14. Onsite/online visitor experience. No more waiting in line or navigating a large crowd in a small space to truly experience all the houses. New technologies and a flexible budget expand the possibilities for the competition to reach more people in new ways. Today’s 3D Virtual Reality options, such as those offered by Matterport, are more affordable, fun, and realistic than ever before. By SD2019, they will be even more affordable, fun, and realistic. By embracing these technologies, the SD2017 and SD2019 Solar Decathlon houses will be experienced by exponentially more people than all the previous competitions’ houses combined. These technologies make the expansion of the competition’s impact in the K-12 education community particularly exciting.
15. Growth opportunities. The dramatically lower cost of entry, increased ease of execution, and higher ROI mean that many individual states, individual climate regions, and additional countries will become Solar Decathlon “franchisees.” Thus, the program’s impact will expand horizontally at no additional cost to DOE.
16. No academic compromises. Many fewer missed classes, academic calendar issues, engineers/architects working in unrelated disciplines (e.g., house transportation), etc.
17. Team expenses with long-term ROI. In the decentralized model, teams can easily justify all project expenses to the university and the team’s potential sponsors because the ROI are compelling and immediately apparent. Fewer necessary expenses will have little/no sponsorship potential or ROI, such as house/team transport.
18. Rental income opportunities. Teams have new opportunities to recoup costs by renting houses to students, to other campus entities, or to outside groups.
19. Permanent campus facility. The likelihood these permanent buildings will be sold or otherwise disposed of after the competition, and never to be seen again, dramatically decreases. Because the buildings are permanent, larger, better proportioned, and better integrated into the site, the university will consider the buildings as permanent campus assets, will maintain them accordingly, and will maximize their long-term value to the campus community.
20. High-impact event. The final awards ceremony can move back to Washington, D.C., where it belongs for many obvious reasons.
21. Agility. The elimination of the program administrator’s Event Production and Site Operations sub-teams means that a more agile and efficient workflow can be adopted, and the program administrator can be more responsive to impromptu DOE requests.
22. Competition-to-competition improvements. A full year of performance data in 20 competition houses will be extremely valuable to subsequent competition teams and the building science community, which is always starving for high quality performance data. The new feedback cycles that the 365-day evaluation makes possible will result in larger incremental project improvements from one competition to the next.

Target Audiences

• K-12 students
• STEM educators
• Current and prospective college students
• Building and renewable energy scientists and researchers
• Current and prospective homeowners
• Homebuilders, contractors, and realtors
• Parents of college students
• Tourists.

Sponsorship Levels