The BP Solar Decathlon is a competition between several university teams. Each team designs, builds and lives in a solar home. The competition is taking place on the National Mall in Washington DC. I am routing for the University of Cincinnati with their entry called “A Series of Tubes.”

I had a shower last evening, and like most of my showers over the last two years, the water had been heated by the sun. The water heater on my roof uses the same basic vacuum tube technology that these guys are using an a larger scale. I had an idea recently that involved piping solar heated water into an in-floor heating system. This wouldn’t be a good system in areas with frost. I am very curious about how this team plans to COOL the home using solar energy. I will be checking back to get the details.

There is also an internet voting component to the competition, which starts in just a few days. All the teams contribute blog posts to the blog section of www.bpsolardecathlon.com.

Solar energy is free. We underwent most of our evolution depending on it as our only external source of heat. We could have used dogs to keep us warm at night, but I don’t think they wanted to hang around our sorry asses until after we got the whole fire thing figured out.

If it’s mid morning as you read this, look around to see where your cat is. Is it on a sunny window sill? One low tech way to get solar energy is already in most homes, it’s called a window. Installing energy efficient windows are an advanced technology that any homeowner can take advantage of right now. High tech widows appear to be part of the strategy for some of the University teams at the Solar Decathlon.

Using solar energy to replace nonrenewable energy sources is going to take a lot of ingenuity. BP is happy to support this effort.