Reporter’s Notebook: How to spur energy storage innovations
In our “Reporter’s Notebook” series, we feature first-person accounts of News Office writers on life at the Institute.Imagine flying all the way from coast to coast, completely guilt-free, in an airplane that doesn’t emit a single particle of greenhouse gas or air pollutants. That could happen someday, perhaps brought to reality thanks to the incentive of a $10 million prize that has been proposed by a team of MIT students. Ever since the first privately financed piloted rocket was launched into space in 2004, spurred by the $10-million Ansari X-Prize, the foundation that established that prize has been creating similar awards to encourage other technological leaps. Follow-up prizes have been offered for the creation of a practical 100-mile-per-gallon car, and for a privately funded robotic lunar mission, among others. The foundation is always looking for new ideas to promote advances in areas that need an extra boost because they are not attracting...