Online video vote to decide $10m green technology prize

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2008/nov/24/xprize-energy
Online video vote to decide $10m green technology prizeThree videos shortlisted for public vote to decide which should be the basis of a $10m competition to develop green technology ideasComments (…)
It sounds like the ultimate in the internet eating itself - a prize for coming up with the best competition to find crazy green technologies, helped along by an online public vote and a collection of two-minute YouTube videos.

But with a $10m X-prize ultimately at stake - plus $25,000 for the people who dream up the best competition to award that prize - there is the potential for a huge impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The What's Your Crazy Green Idea? video contest, which runs until November 30, has been inviting users to submit a two-minute video describing what they would propose as an X-prize in energy and the environment.

The idea behind the X-Prize Foundation's "prize within a prize" is to find an imaginative and ambitious goal for technology innovators to shoot for.

The first X-prize was a contest to develop a workable passenger space craft, which was won in 2004 by Burt Rutan's company Scaled Composites. That craft, Space Ship One, now forms the basis of the vehicle that will take Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic customers to the edge of space. More recently, the foundation made a move into green aviation by offering $10m to the developer of an environmentally sustainable replacement for jet fuel.

Three videos for the What's Your Crazy Green Idea? contest are now up for a public vote after judges narrowed down the shortlist from 133 entries on YouTube, scored on creativity, innovation, revolutionary impact, and viability.

The contestant whose video receives the most votes will win $25,000 and have their crazy green idea explored as the next X-prize.

Here are the shortlisted clips:

Reduce home energy usage



Jonathan Dreher of Cambridge, Massachusetts must be applauded for coming up with a way of making energy efficiency sexy and potentially very lucrative. Reducing demand by finding ways of using less energy is the simplest climate change solution, but is very often ignored in favour of fancy new technologies and more politically palatable options.

Dreher's idea is to offer the $10m prize to the community that manages to reduce its energy usage by the largest amount in two years. That might be all the homes within a zip code area or a school district. Only one community wins the prize, but the benefit is much greater because of the reductions in energy usage by others.

If 10% of US households reduced energy consumption by 10%, Dreher reckons that CO2 emissions would drop by 8m tonnes.

The capacitor challenge



Kyle Good of Irvine, California, and a couple of his mates think the $10m prize would be better spent stimulating research into alternatives to battery power. Batteries have several problems - they have short a power life, they are slow to recharge (if they recharge at all) and they release nasty chemicals when they are disposed of.

Good's prize would reward new portable power supplies based on capacitors - or as the video rather dramatically puts it, the ultracapacitor. The team set out a suite of technical requirements and stipulate that the device must power an electric car for 100 miles without recharging.

Better batteries are undoubtedly a pressing need, but the X-prize works best when the financial rewards of a new development are not enough on their own to drag a new innovation into reality. If someone had a workable alternative to the battery now they would have no trouble convincing investors to fund their company - by comparison $10m from the X-prize would be small beer.


The energy independence X-prize

Alan Silva of Roy in Utah's idea is a challenge to make an affordable off-grid house - one that does not rely on fossil fuels or centralised energy distributors. His example includes solar panels and wind turbines on the roof, underground heat exchangers and flywheels to store energy.

There may be some benefit in getting people thinking about putting technologies together in a practical and affordable way, but is this prize too vague to make a lasting impact? After all, this is about putting together existing technologies rather than coming up with something new.

You can vote for your favourite crazy green idea here on the X-prize Foundation's website. Voting for the competition will run through November 30.

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