Vote for the next green X-Prize

http://www.plentymag.com/blogs/edge/2008/11/vote_for_the_next_green_xprize.php

The quest for truly sustainable living sometimes can feel about as doable for the average person as sending one’s Roomba to the moon or sequencing one’s own genetic code: It can take forever and cost a fortune, and sometimes, late at night, you sort of wonder what the point was of all that hassle. I’ve yet to meet two people who really want hydrogen fuel cells installed behind their houses or enjoy debating the bamboo content of their clothing. That’s essentially what life is like at the forefront of technology, too – lots of promise and potential, but most of it rather far down the road and currently rather irksome.

That’s where the X-Prize Foundation comes in. It awards $10 million to the first team to produce a substantial technical breakthrough, usually at a sub-stratospheric cost. Tellingly, only one of the four organized prizes has been awarded so far, the Ansari X Prize for commercial spaceflight, which was created with the intention of moving space travel out of the exclusive realm of government programs. Still on the docket are the Google Lunar X Prize, for sending robots to the moon, a genomics award, and one for super-efficient vehicles.

Now the foundation is adding a second prize meant to cover energy and the environment. After soliciting video submissions for a “Crazy Green Idea” in September, the organization has narrowed the entrants down to three finalists. You can vote on the videos here until November 30. The winner of the contest takes home a $25,000 prize.

I have to wonder, though, whether the three finalist teams really aim to encourage something “crazy.” I’d argue that only one of them does. (It occurred to me that perhaps I should ditch the writing career in favor of one pursuing five-figure video contests.) One entry focuses on energy efficiency and issues a challenge to communities to dramatically reduce their energy use; the most efficient community wins. A second entry burrows down a layer and encourages homes to go completely off-grid at an affordable cost. The third is technology-specific and asks for an ultracapacitor that would revolutionize electric propulsion. The winning ultracapacitor should be large enough to power a car and improve on existing batteries by several metrics. (These energy storage devices exist now, but their capacity lags behind that of batteries and they definitely can’t compete in price.)

The three options span a philosophical divide. Should the entrants be engineers striving for a new, life-changing invention, or should the entrants be ordinary citizens who together find creative ways to be green? Both options have their merits. If it’s the latter, Plenty readers certainly have a big head start.

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