Vanderbilt Engineering Students Prepare for 2015 Solar Decathlon
Selected last spring for the 2015 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, a team of Vanderbilt students is partnering with Habitat for Humanity of Greater Nashville to build Harmony House. It’s a 1,000-square-foot, energy efficient, fully solar-powered home likely to be used as a test site for the housing nonprofit after the contest ends.
“A lot of Solar Decathlon homes in the past have been these sort of weird, futuristic-looking, fascinating feats of architecture, but nothing that some families would want to live in,” said Tiffany Silverstein, a Vanderbilt sophomore computer engineering and math major. “What we’re trying to do is show that you can have a solar-powered house that you can live in. This can be your home in two or three years, not a hundred years into the future.”
The U.S Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon chooses the best proposals from teams of university students and gives the teams two years to complete houses. After Harmony House is built on Vanderbilt’s campus, it will be disassembled and shipped to Irvine, Calif., to be rebuilt for the Oct. 8-18, 2015, competition. Click Here to read the complete story.
Under Solar Decathlon rules, the Harmony House team must raise its own funds to build, construct and ship the house. To contribute to Vanderbilt’s team, click here.
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