Letters to the Editor
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More on incentives
The idea of a prize to motivate the development of a hydrogen engine is a fantastic idea. Once businesses and corporations realize that there's a huge untapped market in green energy, they'll be outdoing each other to bring this technology to fruition. If I remember correcly, Kerry had an idea for an "Apollo Program" to develop green technology.
We have to give corporations and engineering firms a greater motivator beyond simple altruism- talking dollars will get their attention.
DQuintanaNY,
I'm sure your heart is in the right place, but - I'm sorry to say - Newt's hydrogen engine ideas are stupid. The Department of Energy, auto companies, and many others have been working to get hydrogen engines off the ground for years - and have already spent as much as the $1 billion dollar prize trying. DOE targets for hydrogen storage are already looking wildly optimistic: Presently, you just can't store enough hydrogen per gram of storage materials (metal-organic frameworks, light-weight complex hydrides, destabilized binary hydrides, intermetallic hydrides, modified lithium amides, and other on-board reversible hydrides) to make the engines practical - and even if it could be done at some point in the future, $1 billion will be a laughably small reward for all the research money that will have to spent to make it there. (see http://www1.eere.energy.gov/hydrogenandfuelcells/2003_storage_solicitation.html)
And that is just the storage problem. No one knows how to generate hydrogen in the first place without either using fossil fuels to do it, or using some other energy source - which, even if it were renewable - would pose the question - why not find a way to make electric cars better if the hydrogen alternative requires one to, say, convert electricity generated by a wind turbine via water splitting into hydrogen. Hydrogen generation introduces another step in the process that will waste more energy.
Basically, I think that a large fraction of the hydrogen research community knows full well that the "hydrogen car" and the "hydrogen economy" are the Bush administration's version of the strategic defense initiative (a.k.a., SDI, a.k.a. "Star wars"). Easy to make nice graphics and powerpoint presentations for and easy for history professors like Newt to bullshit about, but harder than hell to actually make work - an absolutely impossible to do with a measly $1 billion.
Incentives like Newt's have a place, but that place is not engine design where extremely mature industries are in place already (autos, for example) and the players will never again include a smart guy tinkering in his basement.