Google's Little Box Challenge opened for entries on Tuesday, with a $1 million prize for any group that can build a smaller and less expensive power inverter. Power inverters are devices that turn direct current gathered by solar or wind power and stored in batteries and turn it into the alternating current that powers homes, offices, cars and pretty much everything in the modern world. Creating cheaper and more portable inverters could really encourage more people to turn to solar power and get electricity to remote place that currently have little or no access to electric power. The average power converter right now is about the size of an ice cooler, and Google hopes people will make them about 10 times smaller.
"We believe that inverters will become increasingly important to our economy and environment as solar PV, batteries, and similar power sources continue their rapid growth," the contest page states. "More broadly, similar forms of power electronics are everywhere: in laptops, phones, motors drives, electric vehicles, wind turbines, to give just a few examples. We expect that the innovations inspired by this prize will have wide applicability across these areas, increasing efficiency, driving down costs, and opening up new uses cases that we can’t imagine today. It also doesn’t hurt that many of these improvements could make our data centers run more safely and efficiently."
Applications for the Little Box Challenge close on September 30. Teams that get their applications in by then will have until July 22 next year to get their technical specs and testing method submitted, with a final winner picked in January of 2016.
"[F]igure out how to shrink an inverter down to something smaller than a small laptop (a reduction of > 10× in volume) and smaller than everyone else, and you’ll win a million dollars (and help revolutionize electricity for the next century)."
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