Kyle Good (left) and Bryan Le (right) receive their $25,000 check from: (top left to right) S. M. Shahed, corporate fellow of Honeywell Turbo Technologies; Neil Blakesley, vice president of strategy and marketing at BT Americas; Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation; Lee Stein, founder of Prize Capital; and Mark Bernstein, managing director of USC's Energy Institute.
(Credit: X Prize Foundation)The X Prize Foundation announced the winner of its "What's Your Crazy Green Idea?" competition on Thursday.
The first-place winners, which will receive $25,000, were University of California at Irvine students Kyle Good and Bryan Le on the Capacitor Challenge team, for their idea that someone should develop a more efficient energy storage device to replace batteries, for everything from iPods to cars.
Unlike other X Prize competitions, the winners of "What's Your Crazy Green Idea?" were not picked by a panel of educationally pedigreed judges to build an invention for which they submitted plans.
Instead, the creative-idea winners of the "X Prize in Energy and Environment" were chosen through a contest held on Google's YouTube. Competing among 130 submissions, Good and Le's team video garnered about 4,200 votes.
"Capacitors recharge in seconds, survive thousands of recharge cycles, and provide high-efficiency electricity by using environmentally benign materials. But here's the challenge: capacitors are far more expensive (and) provide far less energy than common batteries," Le said in his team's contest pitch video on YouTube (below). "We invite the next generation of inventors and engineers to construct an energy storage device far more advanced, far more environmentally friendly, far more affordable than we have yet to see in our lifetime."
While they are absolutely right about the need for such a device, the idea is quite a hard technological challenge.
For the engineering geniuses game for taking a crack at this, here are the guidelines, as proposed by the Capacitor Challenge team:
- Use only self-contained capacitors.
- Exceed the energy density of average lead acid batteries.
- Fully recharge in less than a minute and up to 500,000 cycles.
- Be completely recyclable and incorporate nontoxic materials.
- Cost less than twice the price of average lead acid batteries.
YouTube might be best known for videos of cute animals and teens dancing with light sabers. But one nonprofit wants to use it as an idea factory.
The X Prize Foundation, the same organization behind the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize to send private vehicles to the moon, said Tuesday that it has put together an eco challenge for YouTubers called "What's your crazy green idea?" Dream up a world-changing idea to stop global warming, post a two-minute YouTube video about it, and it could be worth $25,000.
That's a paltry sum compared to the $10 million at stake for the X Prize's upcoming Automotive X Prize for energy-efficient vehicles. But the X Prize's goal with the YouTube contest is to drum up ideas from the general public for its next big Energy and Environment Challenge, which would potentially be worth millions to the people who implement the idea. For now, venture firm Prize Capital has staked $25,000 for a concept alone.
The X Prize Foundation is behind the $10 million Archon X Prize for Genomics and the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize to build a moon vehicle that can surf over lunar rocks. The YouTube contest is one of its first smaller-scale contests to seed a larger challenge, but it fits in with a broader investment theme of the environment. The foundation is scouting for breakthroughs in clean fuels, renewable energy, energy efficiency, energy storage, carbon reduction, and sustainable housing.
The video contest was announced Tuesday at a forum with Massachusetts Institute of Technology called "Seeking Radical Breakthroughs in Alternative Energy--What I Would Advise the Next President." The X Prize group teamed with MIT to host a fall lab class for students to come up with ideas on energy and environment challenges. Last semester, the same idea focused on health care resulted in a student idea for a tuberculosis diagnostics X Prize competition to help save 1.6 million lives per year.
But you don't have to attend MIT to think of an environmental prize. For the YouTube contest, people must submit their ideas to the Google-owned site before October 31. The three best will then be posted on the X Prize Web site on November 15, and the public can vote for the most outstanding within two weeks.
The guidelines are to answer three questions: What is the worldwide problem that you are trying to solve?; what is the specific prize idea, with rules and judging criteria?; and how will it benefit humanity?
Maybe the winning video will somehow involve a cute animal with a light saber?
In the race to curb global warming, the aviation industry lags behind as one of the largest polluters. But the U.S. government wants to help rectify that problem by calling on technology experts for green-air solutions.
On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Transportation said that it will finance a new competition designed to spur innovation in renewable fuels and technologies for the aviation industry. To this end, the DOT, along with the Federal Aviation Administration, has granted $500,000 to the nonprofit X Prize Foundation to form a contest that will call on private industry to develop alternative jet fuels or technologies. The coming aviation X Prize could carry a prize purse of $10 million or more for the winner--contest money to be provided by a yet-to-be-determined private sponsor.
"It will be a competition that everyone wins, because a breakthrough in alternative jet fuels is a potential game-changer that could bring lower airline fuel costs, greater U.S. energy independence, and cleaner air," U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters said in a statement. Peters announced the grant Thursday at the American Association of Airport Executives summit in Washington D.C.
The creation of an aviation prize is part of the FAA's so-called Next Generation air traffic modernization program, or "NextGen." The goal of the FAA's program is to double the capacity of the U.S. aviation traffic system by 2025, but by maintaining the growth in a carbon-neutral fashion. The FAA believes that alternative aviation fuels or so-called coupling technologies--those that might mitigate air pollutants, for example--may be able to offset the greenhouse gas emissions expected from increased air traffic.
The grant is also among the first given from the government to the X Prize Foundation to form an industry X Prize. The Foundation has been in talks with the DOT and FAA about a potential aviation contest for alternative fuels since the mid-90s, when the nonprofit first announced its Ansari X Prize, a competition to foster private suborbital space flight which was won in 2004. In recent months, the DOT issued a request for proposal to the industry to run a similar aviation contest for alternative fuels, and it ultimately chose the X Prize Foundation.
The nonprofit plans to consult with industry experts over the next 14 months to develop its aviation prize, including setting rules that will govern the competition. After that time, it expects to launch the competition by 2011, with the goal for it to be completed by 2016. Once announced, it would be the X Prize Foundation's fifth official X Prize competition, including the current $10 million Archon X Prize for Genomics, the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, and the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize for energy-efficient vehicles.
For that prize, the Department of Energy has granted $3.5 million to the X Prize Foundation to educate young people about energy-efficient autos.
"With all the discussion about global warming, the increasing cost of oil, and the increasing congestion everyone's feeling at the airport, we need to do something dramatic about it and we think it's the contest model," said Jason Morgan, senior director of prize development at the X Prize Foundation.
The X Prize Foundation, best known for sponsoring space travel competitions, on Thursday offered $10 million to make a super-efficient car.
At the New York International Auto Show, the foundation and sponsor Progressive Casualty Insurance announced the newly named Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize. The competition, open to both established automakers and unknown engineers, is meant to result in "real cars" that are available for purchase, rather than concept cars.
An X Prize contender: the Air Car from Zero Pollution Motors
(Credit: Zero Pollution Motors)More than 60 teams have for a signed up for the competition, including Aptera Motors and Tesla Motors, California electric-car manufacturers; Loremo, a German maker of diesel fuel cars; and a team from Cornell University, according to the Associated Press.
The winners will participate in a cross-country race in 2009, in which entries will be judged on fuel efficiency, speed, distance, and other factors. One entrant in the competition will be the air-powered car from MDI Motors, which will be developed in the United States by Zero Pollution Motors.
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