Zero energy house

OK last reference to the Newsweek article but it's chock-full of the feeling that everyone is going green based on common sense. When Jeff Martin, a program manager for Microsoft, set out to build a sustainable house near Charlotte, N.C., he specified something that looked like a house, not "a yurt, or a spaceship, or something made out of recycled cans and tires in the middle of the desert." He turned to Steven Strong, a Massachusetts-based renewable-energy consultant who says he "fell in love" with solar energy when he realized that "you could put a thin sliver of silicon, with no moving parts and no waste, in the sun and generate electricity forever." Strong designed an unobtrusive solar-cell array on the roof of Martin's conventional stucco-and-stone house to provide free electricity, and a sun-powered heater that produces so much hot water Martin can use it to wash his driveway. "We never run out," Martin boasts, "even when my wife's family comes to visit over Christmas."