The University of California, Davis campus began construction on the nation’s largest net-zero residential development last week.

The UC Davis West Village neighborhood will be home to more than 2,000 students, faculty and staff when it’s finished and will be powered 100 percent by 4 megawatts of solar photovoltaic panels.

The school is currently installing SunPower panels on the roofs of the buildings and on parking canopies, said Bob Segar, the university director of campus planning.

“This has been a long time coming,” Segar said. “It’s a lot of work to launch a brand new community.”

The West Village was carefully planned and arranged to give the development the greatest natural advantages. Most neighborhoods are designed with a collection of short streets going in all direction, which reduces the number of homes with south-facing facades to fewer than 25 percent of the total, Segar said.

The apartment buildings in the West Village and the single family homes that will be built there in the next phase of the project are lined up along long east-west streets so that most will be able to take advantage of the southern sun exposure, Segar said.

The buildings are also arranged to be able to benefit from the cooling breeze that comes in off of the water, he said.

The homes are also super energy efficient.

“We were able to reduce the energy demand by 50 percent from the new California building codes,” Segar said.

That high-efficiency means the development has to produce less power in order to achieve its carbon neutral goal.

When exploring renewable power options, solar was the obvious choice, Segar said.

“We have just a tremendous number of sunny hours here,” Segar said.

The solar arrays will be over-generating and selling back to the electric grid during the summer, Segar said, and will be drawing from the power grid in the winter and at night.

On an annual basis, however, the development will be self-sustaining.

Segar said UC Davis hopes to get more advanced with the future phases of the development and perhaps incorporate energy storage into the construction, so homeowners will never have to buy power and will instead always be able to produce their own.

Image courtesy of UC Davis.