First Affordable Zero Energy Home in the US

Ideal Homes of Norman, Oklahoma has produced a "Zero Energy Home" that sells for just under $200,000. ZEH have been produced before, but have tended to be much more expensive and thus out of reach of the average consumer.

The home is connected to the power grid, but attempts to satisfy as much of it's own energy requirements through alternative, renewable methods as well as utilizing high efficiency construction techniques, resulting in net zero energy consumption for the year.

From the site:

"Zero energy homes get a black eye in my mind," says McKown, "Every time they do a demonstration site, they run out and they hire some brilliant architect and they go off and they build this one-off amazing house that sticks out of the neighborhood like a prairie chicken, and it costs a million dollars. Everybody looks at that and says, 'That's interesting. With enough money, you can do anything.' "We wanted to show that you can take any house out of a builder's product line," McKown continues, "and make it a zero energy house and it would look and feel and be just like a regular house, and it doesn't have to cost a million dollars. We could do it under $200,000."

The home made use of some interesting energy saving technology, such as:

• Tankless water heaters
• Ground source heat pumps
• South facing solar panels
• Low-e vinyl windows
• Fresh Air HVAC system

The home isn't currently one of the models that Ideal Homes sells. The company says that as people toured the home, they were more interested in the energy saving technology found in the home and using it to achieve super high efficiency, rather than actually having a home be zero energy, oddly.