Solar Decathlon’s Team New York discovers NYC’s most underutilized real estate
The phrase “underutilized real estate in New York City” may strike many as an oxymoron: isn’t every square inch of the city covered in asphalt, concrete, buildings or park space? If you’re equating “real estate” with “land,” you’re right, but like early 20th-century developers that saw opportunities to build upward, Solar Decathlon 2011′s Team New York thought creatively about the notion of available space in the Big Apple. While land’s at a premium, the students from the City College of New York’s Spitzer School of Architecture and the Grove School of Engineering realized that many of the city’s buildings have flat rooftops – and those rooftops represent 1.6 billion square feet ripe for sustainable development.
Read More »Solar Decathlon: The Envelope, Please…
While the 2009 Solar Decathlon officially wrapped up yesterday, the winners of the solar-powered home design competition were announced Friday morning. While sixteen of the twenty student teams hailed from the US, an international competitor took the gold: Team Germany received the highest number of points, and scored a repeat of its ’07 win.
Read More »The Solar Decathlon is coming to DC
With all of the talk of green jobs as a source of recovery from the economic doldrums, and climate change as a top priority for legislative action, the timing couldn’t be better for the next edition of the Solar Decathlon. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, this event brings twenty teams of college students from around the world together every two years to compete not in running, jumping, and throwing, but designing, building, and displaying a home that runs completely on solar energy.
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