Mike Strizki’s house, the house of the future, the revolutionary house that
might very well change our lives forever, is an unremarkable two-story,
3,000-square-foot, white colonial-style kit home in front of which, one rainy
day last November, were parked no fewer than seven trucks and cars, a pair of
Jet Skis, a speedboat on a trailer, several golf carts, a small tractor, a
couple of vans and an old dump truck rusting in the middle of the woods, like a
major reworking of a Robert Frost poem. There was nothing odd, or futuristic, or
exotically “eco” about the house — no solar panels to be seen, no giant arrays
of thermopane windows passively drinking up light and heat; yet here, I’d been
told, in the Sourland Mountains in New Jersey, an hour from Manhattan, was a
house that had the potential — not long from now, not 20 years from now, but
maybe within 5 to 10 years — to help turn millions of American homes into fully
self-sustaining power plants, each ...