So it turns out the  University of Maryland's award-winning green home garnered some real green in selling it to Pepco.  The Washington area utility paid $200,000 for WaterShed, the solar-powered, water-recycling dwelling that beat out 19 other university entries to capture the grand prize at last year's Solar Decathlon in Washington

The university didn't disclose the sale price when it announced the deal on Monday, or what it had cost to design and build the 1,000-square-foot structure. But after being pressed, David Cronrath, dean of the School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation, gave up the gory financial details - though only after delivering a lengthy discourse on why the value of their house couldn't be reduced strictly to dollars and cents.

"It’s a complicated story," Cronrath said, then comparing the project to a designing a new vehicle, he asaked: "Can you imagine the difference between a production car and an experimental car?"  What it cost UM and its partners to design and construct WaterShed is not truly reflective, he explained, of what it might cost to build a similar house for the market.

It cost $800,000, Cronrath said, to make WaterShed a reality and get it through the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon on the National Mall last fall.

But that includes the costs of disassembling the house and trucking it to Washington, reassembling it and then taking it apart and bringing it back to College Park after the competition.  It also reflects the fact that students and other team members experimented with various designs and materials, discarding some along the way, he said, and crafted a number of components and systems from scratch.

"We don’t want people to walk away with the ilmpression that if you’re building a house that’s meant to be sustainable, that it’s unaffordable," he said.

As part of the Decathlon, judges assessed the affordability of each entry, stripping away some of the costs of experimentation.  The UM dwelling was judged to be worth $336,000, Cronrath said, making affordability one of the few categories in the competition that WaterShed did not win.  The most affordable home in the contest was judged to be worth $230,000, Cronrath said.

So even compared to the value given WaterShed by independent assessors, it would appear Pepco got a bargain in paying $200,000 for the house.  But Cronrath said it was a good deal for the university, too, because the team all along had wanted to see their creation have a life after the Decathlon.  Having it used by Pepco to demonstrate and test clean-energy technology fulfills their wish, the dean said.

"We’re excited about it," Cronrath said, "because we think it’s a way to achieve our long-term objective: participating in public education on issues of sustainability."