The Solar Decathlon Lives on!

On a Friday in late May, I stood in two fields in Petersburg, Va., and thought about the potential of clean energy to bridge the inequalities and injustice deeply rooted in the history of the place and the very soil I was standing on.

The first field was at the Petersburg National Battlefield, where Union troops stormed a Confederate gun battery in June of 1864, beginning an almost-10-month siege of the city, which led to the end of the Civil War. The battle raged over a plantation where, on one side of a modern-day walking path, a three-story family home once stood, and on the other, the cabins of the 22 enslaved people the family owned.

The second field — about five miles away — was an overgrown acre at the Petersburg Oasis Agrihood, a community farm where African American urban farmers are also making a stand, to “sow and grow” their way out of the city’s food desert, one of the largest in Virginia. They have teamed up with a group of students from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond to design and eventually build an affordable housing project made up of eight net-zero, solar-powered homes.

I first heard about the Agrihood project at a green building conference in Los Angeles in April, and was on the ground in Petersburg for an open house at the farm, where local officials and prospective funders would tour the property and hear about the VCU plan.

The homes would be the “next iteration” of the Agrihood, which is part of an African American urban farming network aimed at bringing fresh produce to families in the region, while training a new generation of farmers with a strong connection to the land.

“Taking it to the next level with the net-zero homes, the affordable housing, we just believe that this is an organic or natural direction for us to flow in,” said Tyrone Cherry, the founder of the Agrihood. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines a food desert as any area where 20% or more of the population is considered low-income and, in urban areas, lives one mile or more from a large grocery store that provides healthy, affordable food, like fresh fruit and veggies. In rural areas, the distance is 10 miles. 

In Petersburg, more than a third of the population fit that profile and are also “cost-burdened,” meaning they pay a third or more of their income on rent, leaving them less money to buy healthy, fresh food, if it’s available. 

The city has a single major grocery store, a Food Lion, about 2 ½  miles, and a 10-minute drive, from downtown and 4 miles, 11 minutes from the Agrihood.

Cherry sees the Agrihood and its plans for net-zero homes as a potential model for other food-desert communities in the state.  It shows “what can happen not only when we get back to the land, but when we go back to the land as a community,” he said.

For Duron Chavis, founder of the Central Virginia Agrarian Commons, the nonprofit that owns the Agrihood, the farm and the VCU housing project are both steps toward what he calls “reparative land justice.”

“We’ve been working to not only address the lack of healthy food in our region, but more explicitly … [to] utilize land as a tool, as an intersectional tool, to address both food access, climate resiliency and affordable housing.”

The goal is cultivating “an abundance mindset,” Cherry said. “It’s the mindset that we’re not going to run out as long as we keep sowing and growing.”

The houses 

As you may have figured out, this is a story with a lot of moving parts that may not fit together in a seamless narrative, but I will ask you to hang in here with me. It’s the kind of complex, under-the-radar story I started E/lectrify to write about.

 The VCU project was developed for the Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon – before it was renamed the BuildingNEXT Student Design Competition. Over a series of meetings at the farm and VCU, the students worked with Cherry, Chavis and others in the Agrihood network to ensure the project answered community concerns and needs. 

The result is an incredibly creative, detailed and ingenious project, and with one exception, the school’s team was all female, including faculty adviser Laura Battaglia, an architect and professor of interior design.

According to the students’ presentation, the Agrihood’s eight solar-powered homes would be oriented with roof lines and windows to take advantage of natural sunlight and cross-ventilation, with super tight insulation and high-efficiency windows. A closed-loop, underground geothermal system — with a single well, 590 feet deep — would provide heating and cooling for all eight homes (see below).  

“Ground-loop heat recovery maximizes the ground-loop exchange and embodies high efficiency in a tight space,” said , Mehak Chopra, a computer engineering student who worked on the project. “The heat-pump water heater has been strategically placed behind the refrigerator to use waste heat generated by the fridge to heat water.”

The students also estimated that embodied carbon – the emissions produced in the manufacture of building materials and construction – would be very low. For example, the project would use low-carbon concrete and “carbon smart” wood reclaimed from forest and other wood waste. 

Between efficiency and rooftop solar, residents’ energy bills could be slashed from an average of $263 to $5 per month. 

Small-scale agrivoltaics — building a solar canopy over a vegetable garden — and a community microgrid to provide flexibility and support for the grid and power in the aftermath of extreme weather events are other long-term options. 

The history

History is inescapable in Petersburg, where long-shuttered factories with their faded advertisements painted on brick walls can still be found on downtown streets.  

Prior to the Civil War, Petersburg was the second largest city in Virginia, after Richmond. Located about 25 miles south of the capital, it was a major industrial and transportation hub, and home to the largest community of free African Americans in the state – over 3,200, one-third of whom owned property, according to a brief history of the city.

But even free Blacks faced restricted lives — they could not vote, serve on juries or travel outside the city without permission — and slavery was an integral part of the local economy. Today, a plaque on a downtown street corner marks the place where, every year, owners rented out their enslaved people to work in local factories.

Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant lay siege to the city from June 1864 to April 1865, to cut off the railroad lines that provided critical supplies to Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army. It was the longest battle of the Civil War, with the largest number of African American troops serving in the Union forces and, in some cases, sustaining heavy losses. 

According to the National Park Service, the African American soldiers who fought in the Petersburg campaign earned 15 of the 16 Medals of Honor awarded to African American troops during the Civil War.  

One hundred sixty years later, the parallels — and differences — between the National Battlefield and the Agrihood feel similarly inescapable. Through Reconstruction and Jim Crow, the African American community in Petersburg built its own institutions, including the oldest public high school for Black students in Virginia, a historically Black land grant college, now Virginia State University, and several churches. 

The current population of more than 33,000 is 77% African American and still confronting economic, social and political inequality and injustice, whether in the form of food insecurity or the impacts of climate change. 

In addition to being a major food desert, Petersburg ranks among the worst in the state for public health, with a high number of heat-related illnesses reported in the city. 

Chavis and Cherry have focused on land ownership and urban agriculture as basic strategies for improving the health and social and economic well-being of the African American community.

“Lack of access to healthy food is not a static business; people don’t have land,” Chavis told me during a gourmet vegan lunch at the Agrihood (the vegan pound cake was absolutely killer). The vast majority of land in the area is owned by people of European descent, he said, so, he started the CVAC to “remove land from the speculative real estate market and make it available to Black and Brown farmers. … It’s been a quest to get enough land to feed communities.”

In addition to the Agrihood, the CVAC has procured 80 acres in neighboring Amelia County, which will be available to farmers who outgrow the quarter-acre allotments they have in Petersburg. Chavis has also started an urban farming fellowship program to build a pipeline of African American farmers.

The next step will be expanding the network of African American land and farmers to include affordable housing like the VCU project, he said.

Housing would open up the possibility for urban farmers to live on the land, Cherry said, standing on the edge of the acre planned for the project. “You could spend enough time here that [it] makes you feel like you live here. But to have that space now where you can actually go inside and call it home, I think it’s super important.”

What’s next

The Agrihood community wants to see those houses get built, and E/lectrify will be following the story as it unfolds. 

“It’s not a question of if we’re going to do it,” Chavis said  “We are doing it. … This is what’s getting ready to happen.”

The next step for Battaglia is nailing down the amount of funding that will be needed. The students’ original cost estimate for the homes came in at about $252,000 per unit, using software from DOE and taking into account tax credits and other green building incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. The price tag for all eight homes would come in at more than $2 million. 

But the Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill (H.R. 1) — the tax cut and budget package being rammed through Congress— would kill the 30% investment tax credit for residential solar at the end of 2025. Other incentives for energy-efficient building and appliances could also be lost.

Add in tariffs, supply chain uncertainty and potentially high interest rates, and the cost per home will undoubtedly go up — a lot. A recent analysis from the National Association of Home Builders estimates that President Trump’s tariffs could add close to $11,000 to the price tag of a new house. 

Battaglia has snagged a couple small grants to help her work with industry experts to update the project costs post-IRA. She would then like to build a prototype. 

One of the reasons I wanted to write this story, and plan to semi-embed with the Agrihood community, is to ensure that what is learned here — the critical connection between clean energy, environmental justice and historical land reparation — is not lost. 

Despite the name change, this year’s BuildingNEXT event, held at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, did not include an official competition, only a few days of student presentations. A handful of teams were given “honorable mentions,” and the results were not well or widely publicized. 

The VCU project was not among the honorably mentioned, but it is impossible to evaluate how it stacked up against other projects because, unlike in years past, the project presentations and judging criteria were not posted online to be shared and studied by future architects and designers, as well as the public. 

All of which means the impact of the Decathlon as a training ground for new green and net-zero builders is already slipping away.

 Exactly what form the competition might take in the future – if it survives at all – remains to be seen. I expect that the role of solar will be downplayed in new, politically driven definitions of building innovation. The goal of net-zero emissions will likewise be jettisoned, while perhaps “clean” natural gas will be elevated as one of the essential technologies to incorporate into projects.

Building net-zero, solar-powered homes, like the VCU project, is one way to ensure the Solar Decathlon continues to inspire, if not in name, then in spirit and on the ground where history is made.

“It’s only going to be good if the younger generation can take hold of it, and it can empower them,” Battaglia said. “They’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, I want solar panels on my roof … and this is what I need to do.’”

The next generation of urban farmers at the Agrihood is ready — and waiting.