MIT Wants Even More Power

In the spirit of the Ansari X prize, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has recently announced that they are starting an equivalent contest for the green movement. The MIT Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize is also being sponsored by the US Department of Energy and NSTAR. While the grand prize is only $200,000, there are several categories for professionals and students. Teams do not need to enter actual production. They simply need to come up with the idea. Entrants to the competition only have until February 2008 to submit their proposals and the best ideas will be selected to have full business plans developed with assistance from industry leaders. Winners will be selected from those plans and announced in May.

The hope is that the contest will help kick start innovation in the energy industry or start the development of newer, cleaner transportation technology. The rules are very open and there are no real restrictions on what types of development they are looking for. Anything from large scale energy generation projects to geothermal powered hairdryers is fair game.

I always love seeing these contests happen. Some say that necessity is the mother of invention, but I say that having a few hundred thousand bucks on the line helps to motivate almost as well. Hopefully something good comes out of this one, and it probably takes a school like MIT to pull it off. After all, if it was any other school you know there would be at least one entry featuring beer powered cars.