Living in a Solar Power House

This house not only generates all the electricity it needs, it also produces 200 per cent of its energy requirements.

This house not only generates all the electricity it needs, it also produces 200 per cent of its energy requirements. And it wasn’t made by Nobel-award-winning scientists. A team of 24 students from Germany made it to win the Solar Decathlon 2009, held at Washington DC recently, where 20 such student teams had participated. Speaking at the award ceremony, Deputy Secretary of Energy in the US government Daniel Poneman said, “The ingenuity that comes from individual effort is the promise of our future.”

That students, and not R&D engineers, created this house means that all the technologies used by the team are commercially available and can be implemented in the real world—even if the house isn’t financially viable for now. A small house that costs $650,000 -850,000 just to construct cannot be considered a house for the masses. All that cost went into not only high-tech photovoltaic (PV) cells (that produce surplus energy even on rain-affected days) but also mundane things like paraffin and salt hydrates in walls and ceilings for insulation, besides old-world technologies like louvres (slats). The louvres, in this case, were automated so that the PV panels on them always caught the sun at the optimum angle.