NIST testing net-zero home, adding solar to campus

NIST testing net-zero home, adding solar to campusThe National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced that it will test a new, solar-powered, net-zero-energy home on its Gaithersburg, Md., campus. At the same time it announced that it will install nearly 600 kilowatts of photovoltaics on the campus to help power its onsite energy needs.

The home will allow NIST to test various photovoltaic technologies on what would appear to be a traditional suburban Maryland home. NIST broke ground on the 2,700-square-foot Net-Zero Energy Residential Test Facility last week and will start evaluating the efficiency of the installed technologies when the home is completed in July 2012, said NIST spokesperson Jennifer Huergo.

The home is being designed to show that what looks like a typical home can save a tremendous amount of energy, according to Huergo.

“It’s test bed for residential technology,” she said. “So what they’re working on is the measurement science behind these different technologies. We’ll have this test bed that shows how [well] they do.”

The home will be locked up for a year, except for any necessary repairs.

“They’re not going to make changes. It will have people simulators,” Huergo said. “That first year, they’re going to prove it is a net-zero home. After that, it becomes a test bed for different technologies.”

To help evaluate the home, it has a lot of sensing equipment that normal homes don’t have, Huergo said.

“From your home, you get very little information. In the future, you will want a smarter home,” she said.

The home will have photovoltaics on its roof as well as a solar thermal water heater. The array, which will be on the home’s southern facing roof, will be re-configurable, allowing for systems that range from 1.6 kilowatts to 9.7 kWs, according to Huergo.

NIST also is installing roughly 600 kWs of photovoltaics at its Gaithersburg facility. The photovoltaics will set up at various locations and will include a 270-kW ground-mounted array, a 73-kW rooftop array, an 8.4-kW rooftop array and a 242-kW carport array, Huergo said.

“It’s going to help us reduce the amount of energy we pull from the grid,” she said. “Since we’re NIST, we evaluate everything.”

Image courtesy of NIST.