| Twenty-eight university and college teams from United States and Canada participated in the inaugural Energy Department's Challenge Home Student Design Competition at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory from April 26 to 28. Teams presented their zero-energy-ready home designs—meaning their high performance features sharply reduce energy use and all or most of the remaining energy use can be offset with renewable energy—to panels of industry experts as part of the Challenge. Two teams tied as Grand Award winners: Ryerson University from Toronto, Ontario, for their “Urban Harvest” design, and the combined student team from Onondaga Community College, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and Syracuse University, all of Syracuse, New York, for the “Montage Builders Northern Forest” project. Judges evaluated the teams on their design and construction packages, project plans and energy-saving strategies. As part of its Challenge Homes Program, the Energy Department engaged collegiate teams across the continent to participate in the competition and become part of a leadership movement to achieve truly sustainable homes. Through the Challenge Home program, the Energy Department seeks to apply proven innovations from Building America research for high-performance homes that can be implemented by the home building industry. See the Energy Department news release, the Energy Blog, and the Energy Challenge website.   The Energy Department and General Motors Co. on April 24 announced the official launch of the EcoCAR 3 competition, introducing the 16 participating universities and revealing the Chevrolet Camaro as the vehicle selected as the platform for the competition. Participating university teams will be challenged to design, develop, and integrate powertrains into the vehicle that will reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas and tailpipe emissions compared with the standard production gasoline vehicle, and engineer them to meet other energy and environmental goals. The competition introduces students to industry-leading software tools and sophisticated powertrain components and challenges them to face similar engineering design constraints and technical challenges that automakers face, resulting in a real-world training ground for automotive engineering students unparalleled in the academic environment. New for EcoCAR 3, the organizers are ramping up the challenge by adding cost constraints as well as automotive innovation as additional judging criteria. Established by the Energy Department and GM, and managed by Argonne National Laboratory, EcoCAR 3 is the latest Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition aimed at developing the next generation of automotive engineers. The four-year program will conclude in the summer of 2018. See the GM news release and the EcoCar 3 website. The Energy Department on April 28 announced $10 million in funding to support test prototypes designed to generate renewable electricity from ocean waves. The Energy Department-supported demonstrations at the U.S. Navy’s wave energy test site off Hawaii’s island of Oahu will help develop reliable wave energy options and collect important performance and cost data for wave energy conversion (WEC) devices. The Energy Department plans to test two WEC devices at depths of 60 and 80 meters at the open-water site offshore from Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kaneohe Bay. These projects will enable the Energy Department to evaluate technology performance, reliability and cost of energy to achieve cost-competitive wave energy deployments in the future. The two-phase demonstration projects will focus on WEC devices in the late stages of technology development— those ready to be tested at close to full-scale in the open-ocean environment. The first phase of this funding opportunity will optimize designs and plan for the deployment and testing of WEC systems. The second phase will support permitting, fabrication, deployment, retrieval, and decommissioning of these systems after 12 months of testing and data collection. See the Energy Department news release and the funding announcement. Georgetown University on April 23 announced its new $5 million Georgetown University Energy Prize, and it already has 51 U.S. communities—from Alaska to Utah—signed up to compete in the Energy Department-supported event. This opens the prize’s application phase for some 9,000 eligible communities with populations between 5,000 and 250,000. The prize creates an incentive for municipalities and households to employ energy efficiency to reduce energy consumption over a two-year period. Communities will work in partnership with their local governments, residents, and utilities. A committee of judges will evaluate competitors on a specific set of weighted objectives such as innovation, best practices, public education, and collaboration with schools.The application phase will be followed by quarterfinals and semifinals, and will conclude in 2017 when a $5 million prize purse will be awarded to one winner to implement its energy efficiency programs. Eligible communities have until June 30, 2014, to submit their applications. See the Georgetown University press release . The Energy Department on April 23 recognized the Oregon Institute of Technology (OIT) for boosting its use of clean energy at the first U.S. campus in to be heated by geothermal energy, achieving a major milestone toward its goal of making all seven schools in the Oregon University System carbon-neutral by 2020. Partially through Energy Department support, the Klamath Falls campus will utilize 1.5 megawatts (MW) of newly installed geothermal capacity combined with a 2 MW solar array, making OIT the first university in North America to generate most of its electrical power from renewable sources. The school’s Geo-Heat Center has been tapping its geothermal resources to heat campus buildings for nearly fifty years. Beginning in 2008, the Energy Department helped fund further development of the geothermal resources beneath the campus and supported the purchase of an initial 280 kilowatt (kW) geothermal power system. By 2010, the small binary unit was producing power for the school’s facilities, and the groundwork was laid to utilize additional geothermal energy through an Energy Department investment of $3.5 million, with a matching cost-share by the university. See the Energy Department news release. | 
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