Design and economic valuation of a dwelling prototype with a photovoltaic power generation system

The Solar Decathlon Latin American and the Caribbean is a design and construction competition among university students financed by the U.S. Department of Energy. It seeks to provide a sustainable solution to the affordable housing deficit and the global environmental change, by designing and building housing prototypes that can help to manage and adapt to different natural effects from global warming, such as flooding and power outage. The competition consists of ten contests, the main core of this paper are the designs for two of them, the energy performance and the market potential. For the first one, the Minga team from Javeriana Cali designed a photovoltaic system (PVS) based on the requirements of the jury and the technology available in the country. For the second contest, to make the house affordable not only for Latin American countries but also for any society around the world, an economic analysis was made in which the market potential of the designed prototype was evaluated. The results from the PV*SOL simulations show that on average a 1.5% of energy can be overproduced. Moreover, due to the national policy that allows households to sell the energy surplus to the national grid, it is viable for the implementation of the PVS.