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February 8, 2008 > News > Students aim for solar-powered house by 2009

Students aim for solar-powered house by 2009

By Jennifer Luo and Jocelyn Wright | Thresher Editorial Staff

A team of Rice students recently received a $100,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to design and build an entirely solar-powered house by fall 2009. The Rice team is one of 20 selected to participate in the Solar Decathlon Competition, a national competition held every two years to build the best solar-powered house. This is the first time a team from Rice is participating.

Weiss College junior Roque Sanchez formed the Rice team last fall. The team consists of twenty-five students majoring in engineering, architecture and environmental policy. Sanchez, an engineering student, said he was inspired to participate in the project when he read an article about the competition in his freshman year.

“I thought this would be just a great capstone project,” Sanchez said. “These are schools with a lot less experience and a lot less clout than Rice has. I knew there was interest in projects like this about renewable energy and building systems at Rice so I figured that the waters were good for this sort of project to go on.”

The first two courses involved in the project were student-run courses. Sanchez said they collaborated with professors from the civil engineering and architecture departments, as well as Director of Sustainability Richard Johnson. Sanchez gained approval to begin a one-credit civil engineering class at Wiess last fall with the goal of creating a team to compete in the Solar Decathlon Contest. Since then, more students majoring in architecture and engineering have joined the project.

Sanchez said they looked for students from various backgrounds.

“We’re always looking for a very diverse skill set because most college students have never built a house or designed one or managed a research grant,” Sanchez said.

The students divided tasks into three smaller divisions that are in charge of the architecture, engineering and development aspect of the project. Professors from the architecture and engineering departments at Rice will also help guide the project.

The team is collaborating with Rice Building Workshops, a group in the School of Architecture that is working with Project Row Houses in Houston’s Third Ward to provide affordable housing. The School of Architecture has worked with Project Row Houses in the past through Rice Building Workshops and other projects where students designed two-story single family homes.

The medium-income net worth for the neighborhood is $30,000 per household, so Wiess sophomore Alex Tseng stressed the importance of designing affordable, eco-friendly housing for people in the Third Ward.

“Our three guiding principle for design are ‘People, Environment, and Economy’ which can also be translated as ‘Social, Sustainable, and Affordable,’” Tseng, an architecture major, said.

Despite the $100,000 grant, the project needs over $200,000 more funding to cover overall costs. The Department of Energy’s grant can only be used for non-material costs so that it cannot buy anything physical the school could have after the competition. Sanchez said the money would be used for student internships to get the project designed and for transportation of the team and the house up to Washington, D.C. for judging in October 2009.

The team plans to raise funds by asking local corporations for sponsorship and hopes to find sponsors to donate the solar panels needed for construction.

“This is the energy capital of the world,” Sanchez said. “This is a place where I think there should be a pretty big interest in trying to work on affordable housing.”

Sanchez said the team was working on an especially tight budget because it wants to make the house affordable for low-income families.

“We’re working on a shoestring budget compared to what other teams have done in the past,” Sanchez said.

The team has been working on the schematic design for this project since last semester. The next stage of the project will be design development. The deadline for the competition is October 2009. The completed houses will be displayed as part of a big solar village at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and will be available to the general public for touring.

Tseng said this meant the team would need to ship the project to Washington, D.C. for evaluation and then bring it back to Houston after the competition is over, making cost of transportation an immensely costly factor in the overall scheme of the project. However, Tseng said the main incentive for participating in the competition was to provide affordable housing to Houston and give back to the Houston community.

Sanchez said the team was hoping to complete the project before commencement in 2009 so that students and their families could tour the houses to help the team practice giving tours of the house before they took it to Washington, D.C.

Students interested in following the progress of the project can check its web site ricesolardecathlon.org, which Sanchez said will be up and running in a couple of weeks.

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