From TriplePundit:
A few weeks after the big announcement in San Francisco by GE CEO Jeff Immelt that GE would be cosponsoring a “crowdsourcing” challenge for great ideas in smart grid, green building, and renewables, the website is abuzz with almost 1,000 ideas and several thousand comments. The contest, which will award $200 M in grants for businesses and individuals, is part of GE’s push to revolutionize our grid infrastructure, create jobs, and generate revenues in its green business units.
So how is the competition shaping up? After reading through some of the ideas, I think there’s a fair bit of room for people to enter and win grants. I say this because some of the ideas really need a yea/nay button, as people with good intentions but poor grasps of the laws of thermodynamics and/or nature are outnumbering physicists, engineers, and architects on the site.
While broadcasting our monthly green business radio segment, we discussed a few of these. The wackiest? Training blue whales to tow ships around the Pacific so we don’t have to use diesel fuel. There’s also the guy who wants to build a tunnel from Alaska to Russia so no one has to fly across anymore (Sarah Palin was right! The commies are still coming to get us!). There’s the guy who wants to add wind power devices to the front of cars so that batteries can be charged while driving, which of course, would add wind drag and reduce fuel efficiency. The green business humor goes on…..
You can usually skim through the list of ideas and if someone has written their idea in without using any punctuation or rules of grammar, you can probably guess they’re ignoring the rules of nature, too....MORE
