Every other year in early October there is a flurry of building that goes on at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. All the activity is about trying to build the most energy efficient home, and the building is being done by university students from across the globe.

For the second time in a row the Technische Universitat Darmstadt students from Germany took top honors this year (see the video below). Team Germany spent a lot of energy making every square inch of their home into an energy producer. They also were described as “pushing the envelope” on the use of new technologies. The competition wrapped up October 18.

(Left: University of Illinois Solar Decathlon Entry 2009)

The teams decide what to do with the houses at the end of the competition. Some teams sell them in order to fund the entry in the next competition while most return them to their home university and reassemble them for research purposes, and to also publicly display the technologies used in the construction.

There are 10 individual contests that make up the competition. The overall total score of all contests determines where each team places. The contests are: Architecture; Market Viability; Engineering; Lighting Design; Communications; Comfort Zone; Hot Water; Appliances; Home Entertainment; and Net Metering.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (picture at left, above) took second place honors with Team California (picture at right, below), coming in third. Illinois maxed out the points in the hot water contest and got the highest score in the Appliances and Home Entertainment contests. Team California took the top score in Architecture and Communications. It’s interesting that the highest score for Market Viability was earned by the University of Louisiana. Perhaps some of that reflects a more realistic view spawned from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, and the recognition of how temporary our buildings really are.

A very sobering statistic included in the media kit for the Solar Decathlon is the amount of Btus consumed in the U.S. each year. They say it equals one quarter of the total human consumption of Btus worldwide. The U.S. has just five percent of the world’s population. Brought down to an individual level, a typical U.S. resident uses 334 million Btus in a year, while the average per-person Btu use worldwide is just 72 million. But the U.S. universities and colleges are working on this and 15 of them participated in this Solar Decathlon. Also building there was Canada with two entires, Spain with one, and Puerto Rico with one.

(Right: Team California Solar Decathlon Entry 2009)

The video below gives you a tour of the house built by Team Germany.

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