In April 2014, twenty-eight college and university teams from the U.S. and Canada participated in the inaugural U.S. Department of Energy’s Challenge Home Student Design Competition at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.  Originally, the competition was to be held every two years, but will now be held annually, as the event was met with notable success.

The goal of this competition is to inspire college students involved in architecture, engineering, landscape architecture, and construction management to integrate building science in their curriculum and get experience designing zero energy ready homes.  This will in turn provide them with specialized skills needed to be leaders in the construction industry that requires increasingly more efficient and sustainable design practices.

As part of the competition, students and advisors submitted designs for homes that are 40-50 percent more cost effective than standard new homes. National experts judged these design submissions based upon, strategies, clear project plans, required analyses, best practices solutions, and building science principles from the Department’s Building American program. 

The Grand Winner recipients’, Montage Builders Northern Forest and Ryerson University were selected by group of national experts that included leading high-performance builders, building science professionals, as well as, researchers.  These winning designs are market ready-state of the art design solutions for high performance homes that will serve as models for future success. The featured energy efficiency standards in these designs sharply reduce energy use while also offsetting the remainder of energy use with renewable energy.  More importantly, the competition serves as a critical tool for integrating essential new skills into university programs across the U.S.

The Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) success stories highlight the positive impact of its work with businesses, industry partners, universities, research labs, and other entities.