Daily Magazine

Passive Houses are built according to a rigorous series of design principles that promote efficiency.

The basic building block of a certified Passive House is a virtually airtight, superinsulated envelope that prevents the infiltration of outside air and the loss of conditioned air. Because joints and cracks aren’t a sufficient source of fresh air, Passive Houses are equipped with a ventilator that takes heat from the stale exhaust air and transfers it to the air that is being drawn in from the outside. (In summer, the process reverses, with the cool inside air pretreating the hot intake air before being vented outside.) Passive Houses also are positioned to capture the sun’s natural heating capabilities in the winter while minimizing solar gain in the summer.

The Future Living house took twenty six designers to create it, with every technologic leap analyzed to make sure all proposals were possible by 2050. It’s a paradigm shift in home resource creation and location with water using gravity to generate pressure and energy harvested from solar and wind. Air, water and waste are cleaned using a living bio wall.

The solar thermal technology behind Ivanpah—which is being jointly developed by BrightSource Energy, NRG Energy and Google—uses thousands of mirrors to reflect sunlight. That light is collected in one of Ivanpah’s three solar towers, where the intense heat transforms water into steam. That steam is piped to a turbine that generates electricity. It’s the same basic technology behind a coal or natural gas plant—only the sun provides the heat.

Ivanpah also has the advantage of producing electricity on a much smoother curve than solar PV, which means it can keep generating power later into the day. But Ivanpah, which should go fully online before the end of the year, has something else: sheer beauty.

The Solar Decathlon China 2013 is a competition that challenges collegiate teams to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are Net Zero, affordable, energy-efficient and attractive.

Summer 2013 will be the first year that a team from Israel will participate in the competition, and their design incorporates passive design features, creating an improved thermal envelope to maintain a comfortable interior environment. Windows, walls, and floors collect, store, and distribute solar energy as heat in the winter and reject heat in the summer...

Since 2002, the Solar Decathlon has involved over 90 teams and influenced thousands of collegiate participants in interdisciplinary research, design and construction of energy-efficient, solar-powered houses.

Storage of electricity in large quantities is reaching an inflection point, poised to give a big boost to renewables, to disrupt business models across the electrical industry, and to tap into a market that will eventually top many of tens of billions of dollars per year, and trillions of dollars cumulatively over the coming decades.

Energy efficiency refers to approaches or strategies that yield more service value from each primary energy consumed.

Making homes, vehicles, and businesses more energy efficient is seen as a largely untapped solution to addressing the problems of pollution, global warming, energy security, and fossil fuel depletion.