Imagine a totally green house. Not painted green but one that is energy efficient and totally livable. Each year 20 university teams design, build and operate livable, every-efficient, and completely solar-powered houses. That is a pretty awesome undertaking. It is called the BP Solar Decathlon because BP is the major sponsor of this event and a partner with the U.S. Department of Energy. The event is taking place in two days.

Each team builds their solar powered home and in 2 days those homes go to the Washington Mall to compete in 10 events. Here is the breakdown of scoring for the teams.

* Architecture — 200 points
* Engineering — 150 points
* Market Viability — 150 points
* Communications — 100 points
* Comfort Zone — 100 points
* Appliances — 100 points
* Hot Water — 100 points
* Lighting — 100 points
* Energy Balance — 100 points
* Getting Around — 100 points

The event looks really fun. The teams are from all over the world, the bulk of the teams are from many top US colleges. BP has created a blog about the event so you can follow the action as it occurs. You can follow your favorite team. There are even things for spectators to do on the blog and if you are in Washington you can see the solar village too.

Here is the list of the competitors.

• Carnegie Mellon
• Cornell
• Georgia Tech
• Lawrence Technological University
• MIT
• New York Institute of Technology
• Penn State
• Santa Clara University
• Team Montréal
• Technische Universität Darmstadt
• Texas A&M
• Universidad de Puerto Rico
• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
• University of Cincinnati
• University of Colorado at Boulder
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• University of Maryland
• University of Missouri at Rolla
• University of Texas

It is great to see a Boston college represented in this competition. So I’ll be rooting for MIT to win this thing. This event, that has been going on since 2002 and I hope to see many practical applications come from these brilliant minds. Good luck to all teams in the competition.