Registrations for Solar Decathlon India 2023-24 open
Solar Decathlon India (SDI), the world’s largest Net-Zero Building Challenge, has opened registrations for its 4th edition. Over the last three years of the Challenge, SDI teams have partnered with about 200 real estate developers, 150 industry partners and others, and presented more than 180 solutions. This year, Mahindra Lifespaces, Sobha Ltd., TATA Realty, and Infosys have offered their projects to any team within the building divisions. This is in addition to many other real estate partners that teams will onboard.
This year SDI has five building divisions and a new product division. While the building divisions will focus on upcoming and new projects, the product division will focus on the existing stock of residential buildings. Less than 10% of Indian households currently have access to air-conditioning. As the need for cooling grows with climate change, we will see increased heat stress for those without access, and increased energy related emissions from those who gain access.
The challenge in the new product division is to reduce heat stress with passive cooling or improve cooling energy performance with active technologies. Participants of this division will develop innovative product solutions that could be purchased off-the-shelf and installed in existing residences by homeowners themselves or with the help of local technicians. The new product division invites new engineering approaches to cooling to bring retrofit cooling solutions to the market. An entire ecosystem of product manufacturers, developers, and homeowners is interested in this.
Eligibility: Undergraduate or postgraduate students from any Indian institution can register to participate and build a team of a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 15 students. Teams will compete for nine months under any of the six competition divisions. The challenge requires all participating teams to be multidisciplinary. Each team should have at least one student each from architecture and engineering disciplines and a faculty mentor responsible for guiding the team through the competition. Besides this, teams from the building division will need to partner with a developer or a client whose project they will work on.
Teams from the product division will partner with an industry partner who provides support for materials, equipment, know-how, testing etc., along with an interest in the outcome, to help the team achieve its potential. Teams participating in this division are recommended to have students from a range of disciplines such as engineering, architecture, product design, industrial design, UX design, computer science, robotics, and others, depending on the proposed solution. The product division is limited to 15 teams this year.
R. Niveditha, Team GAEA, Office Building Division, Finalist 2022-23 Challenge said, “SDI is a great platform to elevate one’s career. My journey involved a lot of learning about the crucial adaptations required in creating a sustainable future. As a budding architect, I would certainly carry my learnings forward.”
Prasad Vaidya, Director, Solar Decathlon India, said, “Solar Decathlon India’s mission is to train future generations of building professionals to design realistic market-ready net-zero buildings and hit the ground running when they enter the building industry. This is critical if India is to achieve its Nationally Determined Contributions for 2030, and to meet our net-zero by 2070 goal.”
Visit https://solardecathlonindia.