http://www.greatpowerrace.org/
The Great Power Race is a clean energy competition between students in China, India and the United States, an "open-source" campaign where participating teams are welcome to connect with other teams across the globe - collaborate, form partnerships, share information and ideas. Presently, there are 965 competing campuses, 1008 people registered, and 671 projects going on.
From September 1 to November 12, these teams are working on climate and clean energy solution projects to earn points. The teams earning the most points in this phase will enter a final judging round from November 12 to 24. Judging will then take place with an award ceremony broadcast from Cancun, Mexico (and the international climate conference) sometime between December 4 and 7.
Recently, I saw Arun Majumbar, head of DOE's ARPA-E, talk at Boston University. Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E) received $400 million funding in April 2009 through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and is modeled on DOD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the agency responsible for technological innovations such as the Internet and the stealth technology found in the F117A and other modern fighter aircraft.
ARPA-E was established and charged with the following objectives:
To attract many of the U.S.’s best and brightest minds—those of experienced scientists and engineers, and, especially, those of students and young researchers, including persons in the entrepreneurial world;
To focus on transformational energy research that industry by itself cannot or will not support due to its high risk but where success would provide dramatic benefits for the nation;
To organize in a way that is flat, nimble, and sparse, capable of sustaining for long periods of time those projects whose promise remains real, while phasing out programs that do not prove to be as promising as anticipated; and
To create a new tool to bridge the gap between basic energy research and development/industrial innovation.
Director Majumdar said that the present class of US college students get it and are already tackling the issues. I have observed this myself over the last few years at MIT, Harvard, BU, and other schools. The MIT Energy Club ( http://www.mitenergyclub.org/ ) has over 1500 people. Most other schools in the Boston area have Energy or Sustainability Clubs too. BU's ( http://people.bu.edu/... ) is working on a smart neighborhood in the Back Bay ( http://www.bu.edu/... ).
At BU, Majumdar proposed a national energy competition among our colleges and universities in order to spur experimentation, innovation, and learning. He repeated the proposal a week or more later when he talked at MIT, according to a friend who attended that event.
Dr Majumdar's proposal is already happening in a diffuse and distributed manner. The Great Power Race between US, India, and China colleges is one example. The automotive X-Prize where an after-school workshop in Philadelphia beat out numerous competitors including MIT and multimillion dollar tech firms with a hybrid car that goes from 0-60 in less than 5 seconds and gets 70 mpg on the highway and 100 mpg in the city.
16 year old Azeem Hill explains why he participated:
Another instance of "The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed" or connected.
hat tips to Treehugger http://www.treehugger.com/...
and Bill McKibben at http://www.350.org