One of 20 solar-powered homes on display at the Mall in Washington D.C. This one is from the University of Kentucky. Credit: Mike MiskellyI was in Silver Spring, Maryland visiting my family last week, and had a chance to visit, with my sister Anne Marie and her boyfriend Mike, the 2009 Solar Decathlon. I’m used to seeing some unusual things on the Mall in Washington, DC—our nations backyard—but was quite impressed by the 20 solar-powered homes arrayed there last Saturday. Students from all over the world designed and built the houses over a two-year period, then disassembled them, transported them to the Mall, and put them back together.

The Solar Decathlon judges these houses in, of course, ten categories.

• Architecture — 100 points
• Market Viability — 100 points
• Engineering — 100 points
• Lighting Design — 75 points
• Communications — 75 points
• Comfort Zone — 100 points
• Hot Water — 100 points
• Appliances — 100 points
• Home Entertainment — 100 points
• Net Metering — 150 points

There are some interesting differences this year, compared to the last contest in 2007. Instead of charging a plug-in hybrid vehicle, as they did in 2007, teams now have to power a home entertainment system. The sponsors of the contest realized that electronic devices, like TVs, make up an ever-bigger share of a typical home’s electricity draw. That’s happening right now, while a plug hybrid car in most every driveway or garage is a thing of the future. A second new feature is that today’s solar houses are connected to the grid. The category “net metering” was not in the last contest. Teams earn points by sending more energy, created by sunlight, to the grid than they use from the grid. The ultimate goal for those of us the home performance field is that all homes become “net-zero” energy homes, or “net-positive,” meaning that the produce as much or more than the grid supplies them over the course of a year. A big problem with solar energy, as well as another renewable source, wind, is that power is created intermittently. Energy storage is necessary, and it is often expensive and not very efficient. With net-zero energy homes, the grid itself provides the storage capacity. When I lived in a Catholic religious community (Holy Cross Priests), the economics of community life were simple—take what you need and give what you can. Same for a net-zero energy house.

I wanted to take a look at the Team Germany (Technische Universität Darmstadt) home, the winners in 2007, but the house was in the process of being judged. Judges don’t announce when they will be visiting a house and which category they will be judging. Teams must keep, for example, the shower water in their solar homes at a precise temperature and flow rate all during the contest. No one knows when a judge will come to the door with a thermometer and flow gauge.

We walked by every house, and stopped at two—with the smallest lines snaking there way out front. (The Solar Decathlon expected as many as 250,000 visitors this year—looks like they made it.) We took a tour of the Iowa State and the University of Kentucky homes. I was partial to the simplicity and the day-lighting scheme of the Iowa house, which made use of simple pine siding and clerestory windows. Mike was more impressed with the Kentucky house, which had some pretty nifty fold up furniture and other creative uses of space. A member of the Kentucky team told us they were inspired by Shaker furniture. The house had wooden chairs, designed in Kentucky and made in Italy, that folded up to be hung on the walls, with decorative features that makes them pleasing to the eye. The Iowa house was made specifically with an older couple in mind. It has a simple layout and it is easy to move around in. Both the Iowa and Kentucky houses had big open showers in the bathrooms, with tiled floors and drainage. Energy efficiency and luxurious (though low-flow) showers can go hand in hand!

As of this writing (Wednesday), Team California, (Santa Clara University and California College of the Arts) is in the lead, with Illinois (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) in second, Team Germany in third, and Team Ontario/BC (University of Waterloo, Ryerson University, and Simon Fraser University) in fourth. The categories of Net Metering, Engineering, and Lighting Design have yet to be judged.

Updates soon!

Cool the Earth is an organization that reaches into elementary school classrooms and Girl Scout troops all over the country, and they're working to make saving energy and being good stewards of our natural resources fun. Participating schools are given a packet of materials to kick off the program with an all school assembly, where characters like Koda the polar bear, Earth, Mother Nature, and Mr. Carbon (boo! hiss!) introduce the topic of global warming and how human actions contribute to the problem. The kids are inspired to save Koda's icy homeland by getting rid of the villain Mr. Carbon.

The students are given a small book of action coupons to take home that recommend tips such as powering down home electronics that use energy when officially "off" but are still in standby mode by unplugging the device or turning off the power at a power strip. Students can earn rewards in the form of prize cards featuring Wasteful Wendy, Rennie Reusable and other characters, for actions such as getting their families to eat one pound less of beef in a week, thereby saving 130,000 gallons of water (the water to grow the crops to feed the cattle, and so on.)

Monthly highlights focus on a particular action, and an Action Banner tracks the progress of the whole school, charting the amount of energy saved and the amount of greenhouse gases avoided. School teachers can go online to access materials, get advice from the staff of Cool the Earth, or just brag about how their school is doing.

The program is working because it employs an age-old motivational strategy– get to the parents through their kids. And the results are tangible. The program so far can account for more than 25 million pounds of carbon emissions avoided. There are 149 schools involved in the program so far, and there is a waiting list for participation. Almost 23,000 students are involved– translating into many more thousands of parents, brothers, and sisters.

A carbon-tracking cell phone. Credit: Nokia
"Do I get to keep the phone?"

Not exactly the environmentally-conscious line of thinking that organizers were hoping for, but understandable for those high-schoolers holding a brand new, latest version of the Nokia in their hands.

The way the San Francisco pilot program works is like this: students get a mobile phone equipped with a GPS maps application. They fill out a profile with the make and model of the cars they use. The cell phone monitors movement, so it picks up when that student is making a car trip. The server factors in the time of day, the weather and humidity, and the type of car the student is riding in – and then calculates the amount of carbon output that trip represents.

The program currently doesn't differentiate between cars and other forms of transportation – bikes, ferries, trains, carpools, buses – so students may need to note when those trips were not regular car trips. The final number is their carbon rating.

When the program expands to three other San Francisco schools at the end of March 2009, a competition will be formed between the high schools to see which group of 25 students can cut back the most on their car trips and carbon output.

That will help answer the question of how much pollution people can save just by altering transportation behavior. And hopefully, the participants here are young enough that those transportation choices might continue after the program has ended. Once they get used to walking or biking, for instance, maybe they'll make that a regular form of transportation.

That, of course, doesn't ameliorate the answer to the other burning question – that, yes, the cool phone goes away when the pilot program ends.

Listen to the Tracking Carbon through Your Cell Phone radio report online.

Cal Academy scientist Kelly Herbinson
collects ants with a Bay Area science teacherAs the winter drags on, I often think fondly of a chilly Saturday in December where I found myself in a small alleyway in San Francisco trying to suck elusive ants into a rubber tube called a pooter. What was the point of this seemingly silly endeavor? I was leading a QUEST educator training with the California Academy of Sciences (one of the more fun parts of my job).

I was first introduced to the pooter, an insect catching device, last July at the California Academy of Sciences Nature Journaling workshop in the Trinity Alps and little did I know where it would lead.

The Nature Journaling workshop blended sketching and watercolor techniques with information about the natural area in which we camped. In addition to discovering I could actually be artistic (not one of my strong suits in the past) and falling in love with vegan cashew chili (I’m a big fan of meat), the highlight for me was learning how to catch small insects by sucking them into a vial at the end of a long rubber tube.

This contraption, which includes a small piece of gauze between the vial and the rubber tubing, so you don’t suck the insect all the way into your lungs, is the aforementioned pooter. By the end of the workshop, we had planned a joint educator workshop using QUEST media about invasive species with the hands-on ant collecting activities from the Bay Area Ant Survey and the California Academy of Sciences.

QUEST's Jessica Neely
collects ants with a pooterFast forward 4 months. In early December, 29 Bay Area science educators gathered at the California Academy of Sciences to learn about Bay Area invasive species. We started the day off with QUEST’s television story San Francisco Bay Invaders, moved to some discussion about how to help our students become “media savvy” in the 21st century, and then it was time for the pooters.

Educators paired up and we took a field trip to the alley behind the Cal Academy – not the most ideal location to find ants, but it was the best we could do with limited time. It was so cold that day that Kelly Herbinson, our ant expert, had to set out bait for the ants in the morning. We poked, prodded, searched high and low, and a few of us were able to capture the cagey little critters with our pooters. Kelly led us through the identification process (yes, I’m sorry but some ants were harmed) and introduced everyone to the Bay Area Ant Survey, an amazing citizen science project where just about anyone can contribute to scientists’ understanding of the distribution of ants in the Bay Area by capturing, labeling, and sending in their ants.

Teachers study ant samples to
help identify the ants they collectedA few post-workshop take-aways:

• Despite what you hear on the news, science teachers are doing wonderful work with students

• Students are getting their information from an increasing number of sources and teaching them how to be media-savvy is tricky (not something that is currently tested on standardized tests…)

• Most importantly, ants are AMAZING! Did you know that the trap-jaw ant can snap its mandibles shut so hard and fast on an object that it can propel itself backwards 2 feet to escape predators?

Want to participate in an upcoming QUEST Educator Training? Visit our list of upcoming workshops and register.

And please add a comment if you know of a great educational resource for teaching about Bay Area invasive species. And please share your story if you use QUEST with your students!

Jessica Neely is a Project Supervisor of Science Education.

latitude: 37.781891, longitude: -122.403327