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It's all about the meters. As any would-be installer of solar rooftop panels knows, having the right meter to count how much power your photovoltaics are producing is key. So perhaps it's no surprise that Team Germany snatched victory on the last day of the 2009 U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon with a perfect score in, you guessed it, net metering.
Simply put, the Germans made more solar power than anybody else in the competition: 11.1 kilowatts to be exact. Or more than twice as much electricity as the house needed to run itself, making the home a mini-power plant.
The victory marks the second win in a row for the Germans.
The secret ingredient for Technische Universitat Darmstadt was putting expensive monocrystalline silicon solar panels on the roof but also CIGS thin-film solar cells on the exterior walls as part of the aluminum siding. That was helped by the cube structure of the house.
The Germans also dominated in another category: most expensive house. The surPLUShome cost at least $650,000 for just 800 square feet. The runner-ups—the University of Illinois team—with their barn-like gable house made from reclaimed wood and bamboo cost just $250,000. And that's the ultimate hope of the decathlon—a sunny sun-powered home that doesn't have to be an expensive one.
—David Biello
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Rice home was the most affordable one, $140,000.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe irony not mentioned in this brief article is that at a cost of over $800.00 per square foot it would take over 200 years for the house to pay for itself assuming a 0% loan. The above calculation assumes a 100 dollar per month electric bill and another 100 dollars per month income from selling the electricity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFrom an economic point of view this house is beyond stupid. From an engineering point of view it might be interesting. From an environmental point of view the house might even be counter productive. If we assume that a relationship exists between costs and the amount of resources consumed, than it is clear this house might be more environmentally destructive than a mcmansion so many complain about.
Congratulations to the Germans, pioneers of extremely high priced subsidized energy. Maybe they can teach us something someday, but for now we are much better off watching from afar and not emulating their programs.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCommenters, nay "haters" : houses don't pay for themselves, they get used. People buy planes and cars and TVs and sculptures and computers and donuts that don't pay for themselves, what's the big deal? The decathlon rules don't say "satisfy all the requirements of Joe Dokes", the rules ask for a house that produces more electricity than it uses, and all the heating energy it needs. From a narrow economic point of view, a cup of coffee is stupid. A house isn't built just to cover its own utility bills. One would better compare the incremental cost of the extraordinary energy systems to the extraordinary savings. Having toured it last week, I estimate the incremental cost of this house to be around $150,000. Amortizing that over 40 years, it seems a reasonable price to pay for someone interested in reducing carbon footprint, as well as zeroing their utility bill ($4000 a year, which is a lot for such a small house, but considerable, not "beyond stupid").
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA McMansion usually has a much higher bill than $100/month average. Heating and cooling those things is $5000 to $10000 a year, and only a tiny portion of the $800,000 cost of the German house went to the energy bills of the manufacturers. In fact, the reason the components cost so much is because haters and nay-sayers have delayed the ramp-up of investment required to get to mass-production of many of the supporting components of these systems.
Monocrystalline cells can produce 8 to 16 times the energy required to mine, transport, and manufacture them, in 20 years.
Mr. Inquiring,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is no issue with people making an investment that will not pay for itself. Many things give us pleasure that will not be justified economically. This is human nature. If your $150,000 estimated investment is worthwhile to you to help save the planet, or whatever, that is just fine - spend away!
However, if ones only reason to invest in a solar roof is economics it is, as JoeDokes claims, beyond stupid.
Also, if taxpayers and utility rate payers are obligated to assist in an uneconomic venture, that is also beyond stupid. Let those who value the soft benefits pay for them. Don't make the so-called haters and naysayers pay for them They are simply being prudent. If something actually generates a postitive return, it won't matter what people think - it will be adopted.
I believe the appropriate comparison between these houses are F1-racing cars. Nobody thinks that extreme racing cars should be economically sound, but they lead the way for future developments of your average car, anti-blocking brakes, efficient auto-shifts, just to name a few.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo one would ever buy an F1-racer, the cost is prohibitive, but we all enjoy the technology when it becomes commercial at a reasonable cost.
I'm sure the cost of a self sustained solar house will quickly come into economic reach of the average house-builder, when the extra investment in building the house is payed back by the savings in energy costs.
A while ago, it was beyond stupid to have a $5000 machine runing binary code in your house, and that was basically a very scaled down version of that which big companies had to compute their wages, universities to simulate weather patterns and the military to calculate ballistic trajectories, now days, chances are that if you are reading this rambling, you are using the great grand son of those machines, the computer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe same could happen to solar power, maybe not in solar cells as we know them , but the technology has great chances to become a commodity in the next century
I have said it before, and now again,what differance does make if only one in a million can ever afford it,give us something cheap,low maintenace,with a small footprint,that can be used at every household,and can be done in less than fifty years,because if this can't be done, were are all dead anyway.Its either this or capture something like Apophis, and develop a space based solar solution.The clock is ticking!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"11.1 kilowatts to be exact." huh? Was this the average over 24 hours? Peak output? Summer? Exact?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisecstatist, good question. Answer: it was the peak power specification of the system. It certainly wasn't producing that during the multi-day net metering period of the contest, considering it was a cloudy October.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI get it that this article was poorly written: The first paragraph proposes that Team Germany had some kind of uber-meter, then the rest of the article talks about PV, not the meters themselves.
Maybe 60-second science means "written in 60 s."
vagnry and karl have made better responses to the downers here than I could. The way I see it is that we are all beneficiaries of all sorts of subsidies and laws that people griped about. If you don't believe me, stay away from phones, computers, roads, insulation, lights, maps, seat belts, and clean air.
Also, if someone is willing to pay $800,000 for this house, then making it for $800,000 is not economically stupid. Stupid for the people not willing to pay $800,000, but not stupid for the whole world. Arguments that only apply to you, you should not project onto the rest of us. If it costs Starbucks $3.00 to produce a cup of coffee (because of all the ads and buildings and lights and health plans and labor etc.), and if they find themselves able to sell it for $3.05, then to require $3.00 to produce it is not economically stupid, even though you or I could produce a cup of equal quality at home for $0.40. By joedokes' logic, there should be no middlemen, no value added products, and barely any markups, and everyone should pay the exact same price for the same quality and quantity product, no matter how each particular manifestation of it was produced. But no, we make markups to some point that some middling amount of the market can bear.
In conclusion, Team Germany's house cost so much because people with money value the products and services that went into it. What is so economically dumb about that? If there weren't so many fearmongers lying about how "greenies are going to take away our quality of life," more people would be comfortable investing in and buying such products, and then volumes would be higher and prices lower. Sounds to me like the foot-dragging is the real stupidity. Including my own foot-dragging.
The insinuation is that the government should leave rich people alone, not subsidize their changing of habits. But the rich people are disproportionately screwing with the planet, so it makes sense to fiddle with their demand-side issues. I agree that this is economically confusing, but not so stupid.