Flatbed trucks are rolling up to the OC Fair & Event Center this week carrying precious cargo. College students from as close as Riverside and Northridge and as far as Virginia and China spent months designing and building homes that model affordable ways to live sustainably, only to disassemble those structures and load segments of them onto the trucks. Now they’ll spend the next several days reconstructing their innovative homes along a “street” at the fairgrounds, as they compete in the first-ever Orange County Sustainability Decathlon.
The green village that students are building will be open to the public for free over eight days, starting Oct. 5. Along with touring the prototype homes, visitors are invited to attend a green job fair, listen to guest speakers, watch documentaries, and check out sustainable products for sale.
Thousands of students of all ages from around the region will be bused in for Education Day on Oct. 6. There will also be a symphony performance of nature-themed music, crafts for kids, a sustainable beer and wine garden, and food for sale, with new events still being added to the schedule.
Despite the serious need to move toward more sustainable lifestyles amid worsening climate change, Fred Smoller, a Chapman University professor who co-founded the decathlon, said he knows they won’t win the public over with a “doom and gloom” event. “We want this family atmosphere, this fun atmosphere,” he said.
“You can live a sustainable lifestyle and still have the things that you and I value, like air conditioning and TV. And that’s the message we want to get across.” Along with inspiring the public and giving students a chance for hands-on learning, Smoller and partner Mike Moodian said they also see this event as part of a much larger goal — to turn Orange County and the rest of Southern California into the world capitol of sustainability.
Cue the eye rolls, Smoller said with a chuckle. He knows they’re happening as you read this because he’s seen such dismissive expressions dozens of times over the past several years, as he’s pitched his dream to business leaders, elected officials, and regular folk alike. But sustainability is now “top of mind” for leaders in the local business community, said Reuben Franco, chief executive of the Orange County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
Those conditions make Orange County a “strategic spot for climate progress,” according to Hoiyin Ip, a local leader with the Sierra Club. She said action here can build bridges in a way that progress in, say, the Bay Area just can’t.
And it’s why Smoller and Moodian see sustainability as the next evolution in this area’s economy. “We’re not inventing something,” Smoller said. “We’re simply trying to change the branding.” That effort, they say, starts with the Orange County Sustainability Decathlon.
State Sen. Dave Min, D-Irvine, bought into the vision. “There is no better place to harness innovation than right here in Orange County,” Min said. “The Sustainability Decathlon is our chance to show the world that Orange County can and should be a green hub for research, technology, and high-tech jobs.”
Smoller and Moodian said they’d approached just about every local elected official requesting support for their planned decathlon with no success. But after Min got elected in 2020, the first state budget request he made was for a $5 million grant to put on the event and give student teams $100,000 in seed money to build sustainable homes.
“This event will not only be a huge tourism draw for the region, but I am hopeful that it will also result in important innovations in green housing that we can use to help speed up the transition to a zero emissions economy,” Min said.
Smoller’s wife actually gets credit for the spark that led to this event. Back in 2009, he was at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. working on an academic paper when he got a call from his wife. Lidija Smoller told her husband to head out to the National Mall, after seeing on the news that the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon was underway there.
Smoller had never heard of the biannual event, where teams of university students from around the world came to show off solar-powered homes they’d built. But before Smoller was a political science professor, he said he was a “Home Depot guy” who put himself through graduate school doing construction projects. And when he saw how engaged the decathlon students were and what they’d accomplished, he became determined to bring the event to the West Coast.
Four years later, in 2013, Irvine beat out a couple dozen other major U.S. cities to host the first Solar Decathlon held outside D.C. More than 64,000 visitors passed through, touring 19 student-built solar homes. In 2015, Smoller helped bring the event back to Irvine’s Great Park. That year a team made up of students from UC Irvine, Chapman University, Irvine Valley College, and Saddleback College built a home called Casa Del Sol that placed ninth overall.
With a new city council seated, Smoller said Irvine didn’t apply to host the next Solar Decathlon. So he decided to see about getting state funds to host a decathlon in Orange County every two years that moved beyond solar, to focus on all sorts of home-oriented sustainable innovations. He teamed up with Moodian, who’d worked with him for years on Chapman’s Orange County Annual Survey. The pair got financial support from Min’s bill, found a willing venue in the fairgrounds, and lined up a list of sponsors to make the first Orange County Sustainability Decathlon a reality.
Fourteen teams are set to compete in this year’s decathlon. Southern California is well represented, with teams from UC Irvine, Cal State Fullerton, Cal State Long Beach, and Cal Poly Pomona. Some teams are partnerships between multiple colleges, including one made up of students from UC San Diego and China’s Zhejiang Normal University.
One isn’t a college at all. The Rancho Cielo Construction Academy is a trade school in Salinas that serves mostly low-income students 16 to 24 years old. Many didn’t earn high school diplomas as they struggled with issues such as homelessness and foster care. Some were sent to Rancho Cielo as an alternative to jail. Today, they’re wrapping up construction on a one-bedroom home that will eventually wind up on the Salinas campus to house a staff member.
Cooper Proulx, 20, of Temecula first heard about the O.C. Solar Decathlon from one of his mechanical engineering professors during his freshman year at UC Riverside, in March 2022. And he’s been working on the project ever since, with help from a rotating team of students from diverse programs and some generous friends who’ve put in late nights and hot days to build their first home.
While Proulx is excited about their plant wall, solar panels, and minimalistic Scandinavian design, he said the most unique thing about the Riverside team’s 1,154-square-foot home is that it’s a hexagon. Proulx said they opted to build a six-sided structure first because it allows for the most interior space with the least amount of wall space. That cuts down on needed materials, which is good for the planet. It also makes the project cost-effective, which was important to his team since they didn’t receive any additional funding aside from the $100,000 state grant and donated solar panels.
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