The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon® is a collegiate competition that has inspired thousands of students worldwide to enter the clean energy workforce since its inception in 2002. Today, the 10 contests that are the foundation of Solar Decathlon challenge students to design and build high-performance, low-carbon buildings that mitigate climate change and improve our quality of life through greater affordability, resilience, and energy efficiency. The winners are those teams that best blend architectural and engineering excellence with innovation.
This Solar Decathlon, which spans 2022 and 2023, gives teams the option to participate in one of two Challenges: the Design Challenge or the Build Challenge.
Collegiate students competing in the Solar Decathlon Design Challenge work in multidisciplinary teams to create innovative and high-performance building designs that address real-world issues related to climate change, affordability, and environmental justice.
Teams competing in the Solar Decathlon Build Challenge work during a two-year period to design, build, and operate their houses in their own region, with student work culminating in April 2023 with the Solar Decathlon Competition Event at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. Participants design and build complete, functional houses in their communities to demonstrate creative solutions for real-world issues in the building industry. Teams will compete to earn points by operating their house successfully, and by showcasing the excellence of their solutions to industry expert jurors.
Design Challenge Registration Deadline: Oct. 26, 2022
Build Challenge Deadline: Oct 2021
Each team must be associated with a collegiate institution and include a faculty lead. The competition is open to all collegiate and degree-issuing institutions, including community colleges. International institutions are welcome to participate. Each team must have at least three students, with one student designated as the student team lead. Teams are encouraged to be multidisciplinary. Multiple collegiate institutions may combine to form teams. A collegiate institution may only submit one team application per Division (see Section 2.3.1). A team may choose to have several internal groups of students complete designs and then submit only one project design when the submission deadlines occur. The team application costs $100 per team and is nonrefundable. If a school has multiple teams compete in the Solar Decathlon, across the Design and Build Challenges, each team must have distinct designs and unique team leads and team members. A faculty advisor may counsel multiple teams.
Each collegiate institution may submit up to six applications, but not more than one team in any Division. Only one design per team may be submitted to the organizers at the Project Progress Report and Project Report deadlines. If more than one is submitted, the organizers will review only the last-received file from that team. A design can only be used for one active application. Any school that has multiple teams must have substantially different designs for each, regardless of Challenge or Division.
1. Suburban Single-Family (SSF)
2. Urban Single-Family (USF)
3. Attached Housing (AH)
4. Mixed-Use Multifamily (MM)
5. Elementary School (ES)
6. Office Building (OB)
