UC Davis Graduate Students Part of Solar Home Design Team
This story originally appeared in Comstock's.
Students at UC Davis are building a house. Not just any house, but a solar-powered house, one with the potential to be as affordable as it is innovative and, above all, energy efficient.
The students are participants in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon, a competition that takes place every two years. The Davis crew is one of 15 teams selected to compete this year, and one of only two coming from California (the other team is from UC Berkeley). This year’s event will take place in October in Denver, but the actual construction of the house is well underway in a lot just off of Hutchinson Drive, in the UC Davis West Village area.
The undergraduate and graduate students on this year’s team come from multiple disciplines across campus, such as design, engineering and communications. They have a faculty adviser in engineering professor Frank Loge, who is director of the UC Davis Center for Water-Energy Efficiency, as well as on-site leadership from graduate student Tom Ryan, a veteran of the 2015 Davis competition team.