Hi everybody! Thanks for coming. I'm excited to get you excited about the Solar
Decathlon. So, what is it? It's, it's really two things it starts with the University
competition where we challenge University teams to design build that's
the operative world build and operate solar-powered energy efficient
innovative houses over a two-year period and then come together and compete
head-to-head in a central location over about a two-week period it's also
because we have these amazing houses it's also the DEA's largest public event
so we invite the public to come and tour the houses and learn about Energy
Efficiency Renewable Energy and all the cool things that are happening at DOE.
So it's called a Decathlon because there are ten contests so just like in the
Olympics so here are the different contests each one is worth 100 points
for a maximum of a thousand points and the team's peru's are 60 plus page rules
document and and really come up with holistic designs that make a lot of
sense that are able to be deconstructed deconstructed transported to the site
and reassembles in about a one week period and then deconstructed again and
to go to their final resting place so it's a big design challenge and as you
can see it's one of the nice things about it is it's also very
interdisciplinary so the winning team is the team that best blends design
excellence with smart energy production, innovation, market appeal, and energy and
water efficiency. So as you can see you have to be we teams have to have not
only an architecture and engineering, which is kind of an obvious part of
building a house, but they also have to be able to communicate it, they also have
to do all of the market research, statistical analysis, energy, capture, all
kinds of other skills have to be represented in this
competition and so what's so great about it is that teams have to really put
together multidisciplinary teams that are comprised anywhere from 40 to 400
students and and then they have to work together they have to deal with all of
the frustrations of building a house with a multitude of details but also
reaping the benefits of this huge accomplishment as you can see there are
Asterix by there's six of the ten contests our jury contests so we have
expert jurors from who are experts in their fields determining the how the
teams do in those particular contests so the best way to get an idea of the Solar
Decathlon if you haven't been to it is to see photos of it so as you can see
the first for the contest were held in Washington DC
three of those were on the mall and as you can see right in front of the
Capitol we create a solar village and we invite the public to come and there is a
lot of excitement about it to come and and not only see the village but
actually get to go into the houses and interact with these amazingly inspiring
students so here are just some other this is from the 2009 competition and as
you can see the houses have gotten a little bit bigger this is a different
configuration because we were not on the mall anymore the National Mall we were
now in East Potomac Park right near here and so this is a different configuration
of the village and then after the 2011 we moved to Orange County California and
so this is another photo of that as you can see there's just a lot of excitement
a lot of people we estimate we get up anywhere from sixty to ninety thousand
people visiting the Solar Decathlon so why do we do it we have several goals
that we hit with the Solar Decathlon so it's a great way to we leverage funds
first of all it's providing a very unique workforce development experience
for the students that are involved so much so that
you know they're going into all aspects of energy of architecture of all kinds
of design they are taking it with them in some marketing firms and etc but it's
also a way for us to showcase all of the great stuff that we've been doing at CoA
for the last 40-plus years and because there's also a sustainability Expo that
we have where you know we have booths set up and any organization can come in
and share what they're doing and it's a great way to learn about what we're
doing as well as inspire the public and the kids to take on these these new
technologies or learn how they can save money and also experience consumer
workshops which I'll get into in sections in a second but also we're you
know an orangy organization we want to expand an innovation so building on that
there's been different reasons why the Solar Decathlon started it started
originally because you know not a lot of people knew about solar energy or how to
use it in residential building but it's really evolved and we still have hiring
difficulties so the recent energy and employment report identified that 73
percent of employers across the country and across the energy industry are still
having hiring difficulty so this is helping not only develop skills for the
students involved who are very prepared to enter the workforce but also to
inspire others to either change careers and come into our into our industry or
get it get kids excited to pursue it understand that they have to take on
STEM education at the stay in math they have to you know figure out a way that
they can kind of get into the industry so this is a hot off the presses
infographic that we recently created to show the types of jobs not the breadth
of jobs but the types of jobs that are embedded in the Solar Decathlon so it's
a very busy chart it's on our website and it's interactive so what we've done
here is we've identified jobs across the spectrum right that has to do with the
difference with the different contests so for each job category we've aligned
it with which contest it's part of so that some of them you
can see are part of the are part of the house but some of them are outside of
the house so we have communication professionals we have website developers
all that's important because some of those are embedded in the communication
contest and so on our website if you go on it you could click on architect and
we bring down Bureau of Labor Statistics information about you know what does an
architect do how much does an architect make what kind of educational
requirements does it have what can you expect to make in that field so that so
just a little bit to kind of push the envelope that we see Solar Decathlon
really translating into actual jobs so where we've been a little history
this is going to be our eighth competition we've had seven in the
United States in addition to that it's really become this international
phenomenon there have been five competitions to date internationally and
we're expecting five more in 2018 and 2019 there was a lot of students that
are impacted by these competitions and we estimate that 35,000 students who we
call decathletes have been involved worldwide and as I mentioned there's
anywhere from sixty to a hundred plus thousand house visits so we estimate
that there's been about two million house visits and and every competition
in the United States at least gets literally billions of media impressions
and there's a lot of a lot of startups and careers that have been impacted by
this so just a couple more photos of some international competitions this is
in China in 2013 and this was in versailles france in 2014 so what's up
this is the really exciting part so the next the next one is in starting in less
than three months in denver colorado it'll be the first time we're in denver
and it's in a really interesting location so for those of you on many of
you have been out to colorado it's right near
new well Denver International Airport there's a new transit line that connects
the airport to the Union Station which is kind of on the 16th Street Mall and
the Solar Decathlon will be on the first stop five minutes from the airport so
this is the transit stop and this is by the way our rendering right now what
what is on the event the location is this is a solar powered parking lot and
this is Panasonic enterprise solutions which is the smart city side of
Panasonic they just built a new very large building this obviously is a
rendering of where our solar village will take place so these are the houses
and then this is where the sustainability one on one of these is
going to be where these sustainability expo so in theory you can take the RTD
transit and get off and uncommon experience Solar Decathlon this is this
is a rendering of what the city of gener Denver expects this smart development to
look like in a few years so what's so great about it is it really embodies
what we're trying to communicate with the Solar Decathlon right so it is its
transit oriented it's a mixed-use community where there'll be residential
commercial they'll be hotels the ability to work and live and socialize in the
same community all hopefully saving a lot of energy this is a render collage
of renderings of this year's houses this is kind of what the teams are coming up
with and as you can see they're each very different going back to the contest
market appeal is one of the ten contests so each team comes up with a target
market and kind of a scene that they want to they want to present and very
often they have to do with where the teams are right so if you're from
Florida you're dealing with humidity and heat and an aging population it in some
cases we have a team that still a couple teams that's dealing with low income
where you know rapidly increasing high housing prices and they're trying to
deal with that deal with like infill locations or in some cases teams are
trying to deal with resiliency and resiliency against emergency situations
or really poor bad weather events so these are our teams ten of them are from
the United States and two are from Europe and as you can see they're across
the United States and we're happy to say that there is a local team who has
joined the University of Denver has joined the University of California
Berkeley team so that it will be nice at the event so as I mentioned this is
Daly's largest public event it's really the we are very good at de about talking
to each other and in talking to our industry partners and talking to
universities we rarely talk to the public and this is really where this is
where the cool factor of goe comes in and this is our opportunity to really
communicate that to the public so if you are in Colorado
October 5th to the 15th 2017 please come tell everybody you know who lives out
there and tell our golden field office folks we will be have it is free to the
public free to anybody to come and take a tour of the village take a tour of the
different houses part of the communications contest or the students
have to give really great tours and they have to give short meeting them along
tours there's also the sustainability Expo which is part of like a large tent
we want to have an opportunity to also teach people and really interact with
them and and so there's going to be opportunities to learn all about energy
efficiency water conservation smart home solutions but also we have consumer and
professional workshops that are again free to the public
STEM education is bigger and better at the Solar Decathlon every competition we
try and dedicate for our days so the Thursday and Friday of
the two weeks to middle school school visits so it's kind of a field trip
really fun time for students to come and have what they consider a full day field
trip it's a three-hour experience when they're at the Solar Decathlon where
they get to go and have kind of learn about it learn about energy and then
they get to go tour the houses they get to tour the sustainability Expo there's
all kinds of educational activities that we're bringing in this year but a nice
new feature is we're going to also provide some professional development
for teachers in Colorado and the middle Saturday what's really nice too is that
these kids get to interact with college students who are less than 10 years
older than they are and it really they really serve as amazing inspiring role
models these are our current sponsors so it's everywhere from the the Denver
mayor and the Colorado governor to the airport has been amazing we're also
working with the local utility which is Xcel Energy Panasonic of course is
involved and then just a whole load of others that are involved there's some
okay so let me keep going so this is a really fun contest so this is the
sustainable architecture doghouse competition the Denver International
Airport is hosting this competition they're our partner and they're trying
to drive attention and you know visitors to come to our competition so what
they're doing is they have challenged local design firms to design
solar-powered dog houses that will then be displayed at the airport and also at
the Denver Science Museum too to kind of talk about Solar Decathlon but also so
and then there will be a contest winner that I will I'm luckily I'm one of the
jurors for that and then they're going to auction off the solar-powered dog
houses to the public so I should mention that I didn't know this maybe you didn't
know this either but the Denver Airport and maybe other airports they have
something the k-9 assistant their opee something
with an S cats the cats program where they have dogs that are available to
help relieve anxiety of people who are have a fear of flying so on their
website they have a list of all their dogs or adorable dogs and each design
firm could pick which dog it's designing for so anyway it's really fun contest so
how can you get involved you can follow us on social media you can come to our
website we're very active on particularly on Facebook and Twitter but
we have all types kinds of fun fun videos on YouTube we have anyway you can
see we have just a lot of ways to interact you can volunteer or tell
anybody you know we need about a thousand volunteers so go on our website
in just hit volunteer and you can visit in person as I mentioned and you can
visit virtually so one of the new innovations for this competition is we
really really want to take advantage of the social media innovations and improve
how you can visit the Solar Decathlon even if you're not in Colorado so we're
going to have a virtual visit site where you can see a time-lapse camera of how
the village is evolving and you can see towards the houses you can we are going
to have Facebook lives every day and and we're going to hopefully have a way for
you to interact on our various social meeting of channels because we really
really want to feel the interaction particularly with teachers and the
public who is really excited by this topic so what's next
these are the international competitions that are coming up as you can see China
Latin America and the Caribbean will be the second competition that they've had
there will be the first Middle East competition also in 2018 and then in
2019 there will be the first Solar Decathlon Africa in Morocco and and I
think the fourth one in Europe which will be in Hungary and then we're
expecting to do the next Solar Decathlon us in 2020
so where the house is now this is really cool I spent a lot of time on this so
this is everybody wants to know what happens to houses after they leave the
competition so we've just updated our website with the 2013 and 2015
information but you can go on our website and you can see where the house
is and they're all over the place some of them are privately owned some of them
have been destroyed some of them are an Aaron being Airbnb some are museum
displays including at the Frank Lloyd Wright house some are housing students
in a solar village because one team has been involved so much some are housing
park rangers some are at one is that the McDonald Observatory so they're all over
the place it's really fun so Solar Decathlon is just an amazing event I'm a
huge fan it hits on a lot of different things so it really advances the goals
that gioi has for energy technology and energy efficiency and workforce
development it introduces new technologies to the market it inspires
people to imagine themselves living in this advance innovative houses and it
teaches them how to save money and it's a very unique Workforce Development
Program so it's really just an amazing thing that Gigli does and I hope that
you will if you can't come in person that you can attend virtually so that's
it I think that's it I just have more pictures