David Pogue at The New York Times has an article on the "Solar Decathelon" where 20 award-winning solar homes designed by university students from around the world are on display. The Decathelon is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, which defrays the costs of transporting the winning entries to the show.
Pogue writes:
The point of the event is to illustrate that “solar” no longer means “hippy hangout,” “ugly box” or “Spartan shack.” The homes are gorgeous on the inside, and, usually, on the outside. (Rules limit the house to 800 square feet, not counting porches, patios, and gardens; that, and the necessity to get them to Washington on trucks, dictated a certain boxiness to some of the floor plans.)
There was nothing Spartan about these homes.
These houses are completely “off the grid”—they’re not connected to the utility companies. Yet the teams have to live like normal Americans. Using only power from the sun, they have to keep the TV on six hours a day, run the computer five hours a day, cook meals, wash dishes, do two loads of laundry a week, take four 15-minute hot showers a week, keep the temperature between 70 and 78 degrees, maintain 40 to 60 percent humidity, and recharge an electric two-seater car (that’s the “getting around” part).
In short, they have to prove that living on solar power does not involve sacrifice. Far from it. Some of these houses had hot tubs, outdoor hot showers, SubZero refrigerators, mood lighting and full-blown home-entertainment systems.
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