2
Solar Decathlon winners to get sun time
Visitors tour Team California's solar-powered house during the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
To view this content, Javascript must be enabled and Adobe Flash Player must be installed.
TEXT OF STORY
Steve Chiotakis: By the end of this week, we're going to know who won the Solar Decathlon. The Department of Energy gave 20 teams of college students $100,000 each in seed money. Their mission? Build solar houses on the National Mall in Washington D.C. It is a competition that could charge up some green envy, as Marketplace's Nancy Marshall Genzer reports.
Nancy Marshall Genzer: This is a lot of work just for bragging rights. The competitors had to build a solar house, then re-assemble it in Washington. The DOE judges the houses on things like energy efficiency and engineering. The winner gets a moment in the... sun, but little else.
ROQUE SANCHEZ: We would love that.
Roque Sanchez is on Rice University's team. They made their standard-row house with materials from Home Depot and Ikea. Sanchez says bragging rights would be priceless.
SANCHEZ: And if we can get that sort of attention towards affordable solar housing, that would be amazing.
Sanchez plans to give the house to a nonprofit, but bragging rights could land him financing to build more.
Richard King runs the contest for the Energy Department. He says the free publicity will help the teams with future projects.
RICHARD KING: Some of the teams are very innovative and they patent certain things.
A team from California patented a certain type of bamboo beam. If they win, they can say their bamboo put them over the top.
In Washington, I'm Nancy Marshall Genzer for Marketplace.
This project is about developing awareness in what is possible with TODAYS technology and developing passion in advancing the technology to meet future needs. "Innovative technology" is useless without practical integration, that is what is being demonstrated. The USA's greatest asset is in our "human resources." These students are our next great innovators of technology. This project will lead to a passion for this particular field of technology, with the potential for delivering break throughs not possible by engineers with 20 years of baggage. As to investment, this is the best use of my tax $$ that I can think of.
This is very typical government R&D spending. I'm all for students building innovative projects and learning, but let's "invest" our tax dollars in projects with a return that is greater than 1. I've been in product development for 20 years and college undergraduates develop products that are impractical in the real world and seldom do they have breakthrough innovation.
