Yup, that's right. Three hundred million dollars. For a car battery. And yes, there's a catch.
[Today at Fresno State, McCain will] propose inspiring "the ingenuity and resolve of the American people by offering a $300 million prize for the development of a battery package that has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars."
Battery size and capacity are not a big issue with electric cars. You can get a battery with enough capacity by just making it bigger, and an all-electric car has more than enough physical volume to handle pretty much anything, even lead-acid, when you strip out the motor, transmission, and other gasoline-driven components.
So the real issues are cost and power. As they have been for, oh, more than a hundred years now.
And the real questions are these:
1. Why is it smarter to spend $300 million on a prize than on actual research?
I'm guessing that the model here is the Ansari X-prize, which offered $10 million for a privately built reusable spacecraft. The prize was won in 2004 by a team led by aviation designer Burt Rutan.
But here's the problem: Rutan didn't do any basic science. The science had already been done years ago by others; he just put the pieces together into one elegant package. That's not unusual; when Lindbergh won the Orteig Prize for flying the Atlantic, he didn't do any basic science either. He just ordered a plane specially built from an existing, known aircraft manufacturer.
Science and business have very different working models, and have never been comfortable together. Science works on openness, which means letting everybody else, including (and especially) the competition, know what you're doing, what you've found, and what you haven't found. Business works on secrecy, not letting the competition know anything about what you're doing. At its best, science works essentially without profit motive, while business is driven entirely by profit motive.
For the X-Prize in 2004 and the Orteig Prize in 1927, a profit motive seemed hard to come by. Both of these technologies looked technically feasible but conceptually farfetched, and unlikely to turn a quick profit even if proof-of-concept were achieved. The idea of these prizes was to give businesses, or individuals, just enough of a push to get things moving in the right direction.
But there is no need to give business any more profit motive than it needs to develop a super battery. The profit motive is there right now. Existing manufacturers of hybrid cars would sell their souls for such a battery; that market currently exists and it's huge. Any business who developed a battery of the type McCain wishes for, would quickly make billions -- billions -- in profits. The $300 million McCain proposes wouldn't make one darn bit of difference. So why hasn't anybody done it yet, if the profit motive is already there?
It's that technically feasible issue -- a non-issue to the Ansari and Ortieg, who deliberately designed their prizes around a goal that was already technically feasible. If McCain were to offer a trillion-dollar prize to the first team to send a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, it would go unclaimed. That's just not technically feasible.
In order to make the non-feasible feasible, you need basic research. And basic research does best without a profit motive, when everybody knows what everybody else is doing, and can build on it in an atmosphere of academic freedom. Three hundred million dollars can buy you a hell of a lot of basic research. The question is, what kind?
2. Why is McCain ignoring other areas of energy research, currently starved for money, that could potentially yield greater benefits at lower cost?
For FY2009, the DOE has requested a budget for R&D of $3.2 billion. Here's a graph showing where that money goes:
So for the cost of McCain's $300 million battery prize, we could double the amount we spend on researching energy conservation. Or, we could double the amount we spend on researching nuclear fusion. Or, we could nearly double the amount we spend researching renewables. That's all renewables: wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectric, combined, get about the same from the feds as John McCain's battery prize, even though there is already a strong economic incentive to build a better battery.
Meanwhile, Eric Lerner can't get a lousy million bucks to see if his ultra-simple plasma focus can achieve fusion break-even if scaled up appropriately. Even though he claims to be closer than anyone.
On what planet does this make sense?