There is no argument that the fastest periods of technological growth revolve around major wars. The reason is that there is a great desire to innovate, there is an urgent time frame to innovate, and there is a huge financial award (ie defense contracts) to be had for achieved those goals.

All of these proven motivators have been ignored in the pursuit of alternative energy. We have differed research and innovation primarily to academia, whose goal is to ensure funding for as long as possible, not find an answer as soon as possible. In addition, there is nobody is there to restrict research dollars for something that isn’t ever going to be scalable. I penny shouldn’t go to ethanol, recycled cooking grease, or other alternative methods that will never solve the problem because they are energy budget negative or unscalable. By being fair, we are wasting dollars.

The government should take 50-100 Billion of the wasted stimulus dollars and give it to first private company who can produce a home fuel cell that works in Cleveland, Ohio, allowing it to unplug from the grid.

I think we will see quicker results if companies have to solve a problem to get paid, instead of getting paid for ideas and results that are unscalable. While we may miss out on a few ideas, the benefit I would hope would outweigh the loss.

Certainly the grant and study method is not working quickly or efficiently enough to get results. There is enough money out there to get this done, we just need to focus it and concentrate on results.

Hopefully those prices will come down in our lifetime.