High Performance Home Design Market Study #1

The Solar Decathlon is an international competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy that challenges up to 20 collegiate teams to design, build, and operate solar powered houses that are costeffective, energy-efficient and attractive. i These competition homes are highly visible and typically see more than 60,000 visitors per year. The 2013 Solar Decathlon Competition—held at the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, California—created a remarkable opportunity for Southern California Edison (SCE) to engage with customers on subjects such as energy-efficiency (EE), demand response (DR), and distributed generation (DG). Through a partnership, SCE provided strategic technical design assistance and on-site building diagnostics to a team participating in the competition from the University of Southern California (USC). Because the competition is every other year (biennially), the long timeline allows for ample guidance from concept to finished product. SCE’s assistance emphasized the importance of best practices within construction and key demand-side management (DSM) practices, including loading order, zero net energy (ZNE), grid-tied DG, and net energy metering (NEM). In turn, these activities allowed SCE to extract rich market intelligence on the latest EE/DR/DG technologies and practices. The USC Solar Decathlon 2013 house, called fluxHome™, is an innovative and affordable model for sustainable living that incorporates off-the-shelf elements with digital fabrication technology. Rather than focus on one particular technology or system, fluxHome aimed to seamlessly merge passive and active design strategies into a coherent whole. In addition to the outreach that occurred during the competition, findings from this home and partnership were documented and shared with various utilityadministered energy-efficiency programs.