Speed up green energy: Fewer X-Prizes, more of something different -- and faster / by Doug Mohney

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Sep 9 2010)

1. 

   Green energy technology just isn't moving fast enough to suit me. Maybe I'm an impatient SOB, but if it going to take a decade to get newer storage technologies on-line, a decade or more before new nuclear reactor designs are tested, several decades (if ever) to get fusion into an energy-generating mode, a lot of current seaside cities are going to be neck deep in ocean water before the world sees any results.

   X-Prizes sound like a great idea: Set a contest goal, put up a stack of money, and see what happens when people try to win.  But they take time to run and the ultimate winner has to take more time to move from concept winner to market.  For example, the Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE started in 2008 and won't award a winner until later this month.  Supposed the contest will produce "production-capable vehicles" that exceed the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon, but $10 million in prize money won't buy you much of a product line.   Winner or winners will have to cut a production deal with a major manufacturer -- good luck with getting GM to take that sort of risk -- so by the time the smoke clear's we're at 7 to 8 years in the process before the first car hits the streets, assuming anyone wants to make it.

    On the other side of the "must make it happen" method list is the Manhattan Project.  It's an extreme example because it blew a ton of money in about two and a half years from green light through incepting during wartime with the U.S. government calling all the shots with private industry along for the ride.   It is unlikely that we can spend that sort of money or have that sort of effort in these times unless something Really Big (like an asteroid hurtling to earth) poses an immediate threat to our way of life.

   NASA's Apollo program is the middle ground.   President John F. Kennedy set clear-cut goals -- put a man on the moon, return him safely to the earth by the end of the decade -- and the U.S. government and people lined up behind the goal when the need was to beat the Soviet Union to the moon in what turned out to be a combination of political competition and engineering achievement under pressure.

   In essence, we need an energy Apollo program. One with a clearly difficult, but achievable goal, a clear deadline -- say, under a decade --  and the buy-in of one or more governments and their peoples to do what is necessary to meet it.

   The real challenge is finding a couple of politicians to muster the will to propose and follow through on an energy Apollo project, backed by a reasonable consensus in the scientific and engineering communities on an achievable goal. 

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