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Deployment

The Solar Decathlon is an intercollegiate design competition in which students compete to build attractive and energy-efficient homes. The bi-annual competition culminates with a showcase and performance contest on the Washington Mall in Washington, D.C. where the public may tour and experience the homes.

This home was designed by University of Michigan engineering and architecture students for the 2005 Solar Decathlon, a competition in which teams of college and university students compete to design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house.

NREL deployment services in our Photovoltaics (PV) research program and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Center for Photovoltaics (NCPV) helps raise public awareness through training, education, and technical assistance for PV applications. Raising consumer awareness and understanding of PV is critical to the growth of the PV market and application sectors.

NREL PV deployment support also includes developing partnerships with industry and federal, state, and local organizations. The goal of these partnerships is to foster development of the residential, commercial, utility, and federal applications and markets.

See some of our recent deployment activities:

Building-Integrated PV

Building-Integrated PV Project fosters the widespread acceptance of PV-integrated buildings through the development of deployment partnerships. Through this effort, PV will become a routinely accepted building technology in the 21st century.

Solar America Initiative

NREL is on board with the Solar America Initiative (SAI) to accelerate the development of advanced PV materials. The purpose of the SAI is to make PV cost-competitive with other forms of renewable electricity by 2015 through the development of partnerships with industry and other key players.

Solar Decathlon

The Solar Decathlon collegiate-level competition is all about tapping into the sun to design and build a fully operational solar-powered house. One of the main deployment objectives for this competition is to demonstrate the availability of market-ready technologies to meet the energy requirements of our daily activities through solar power.

Systems Engineering

Systems engineering work at NREL focuses on performance monitoring, characterization, and modeling of emerging technology.