We encourage you to reach out to us. Check out our website and follow our social media outlets. More broadly, there are lots of sustainability initiatives on campus. Serve-Learn-Sustain has many great events to get students involved, and there are lots of courses in sustainability that you can take. It’s been really great having a course attached to our project

Solar Decathlon competition is held every two years. It’s really 10 competitions. The next Solar Decathlon will be held in Denver, Colorado in 2017. It’s an energy contest sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy for collegiate teams, and it’s a way to show, through the prototype houses built by college students, that solar energy is for the general public. It’s an incentive for people to buy solar houses. Solar energy is getting much more efficient, and Georgia is one of the best states in the U.S. for solar energy collection. Solar is clean energy, and net zero solar energy is close to complete maturity. The industry has grown so much in the last 10 to 15 years.

We will be using an eight kilowatt photovoltaic array, so solar panels, on top of the house. We intend to save energy using a very efficient HVAC system and we are designing a grey water filtration system as well. We expect to have battery power as well in the house. The sun is not always out and there are clouds, so the way we deal with these challenges is we’ll have battery backup in the house and grid hookup, which is a Solar Decathlon requirement. Solar Decathlon houses used to be completely autonomous, but that posed a lot of problems. We’re trying to use our IoT (Internet of Things) system to help the user conserve water and be more efficient but to also inform the user of their energy usage and how to conserve more. We can use the computerized system to help the homeowner to do what is most efficient by controlling when the house should pull energy from the solar panels, when to pull from the battery, when to pull from the grid, and when to sell back to the grid to make the most money