How can America get all its electricity from clean energy as fast as possible?
This inaugural challenge has all the elements of the ideal. Cracking this challenge would greatly accelerate America’s efforts toward solving climate change, and crack a model that others could adopt around the world. No one really knows how to do this right now, beyond back-of-the-envelope calculations, or the occasional lone White Paper. It’s a hugely ambitious challenge, but it is doable with the technology we have. Al Gore has been promoting the need to do this for the last 18 months, before he received the Noble Peace Prize for his climate efforts. It’s a problem just waiting to be solved.
There are many other challenges facing the country that we at Next Agenda would like to take on with time. We will learn much from this public Clean Energy Challenge, and be able to apply our learnings to attack other challenges down the road. One that has frequently been brought to our attention is around the future of food. “How could America shift to more sustainable agriculture and more healthy food production?”
Or out of our Clean Energy challenge is the obvious corollary: How could America reorganize its transportation around clean electricity? If you are designing America’s next electric energy grid it makes sense to also design transportation around that new infrastructure.
Overview and Primer
Overview and Primer
Saul Griffith guides you through all the key info needed to understand the climate context of our Clean Energy Challenge. Saul is a serial energy entrepreneur, a MacArthur Fellow and a fantastic storyteller. Watch Saul's video series to get up to speed on the science behind energy usage and climate change.
Common Elements of a Challenge
The Common Elements of a Challenge
And the Key Areas Found on Our Problem-Solving Platform
All of the Next Agenda public challenges have some key elements that always work together and are reflected in the design of the website. It doesn’t matter what big problem we are trying to solve. Every challenge will need a network of smart, knowledgeable, innovative people dedicated to solving it, i.e., “Our Network.” Every Challenge will have Gatherings, and Videos, and online collaboration with Waves. So below we walk through the six common elements, and in doing so we essentially walk you through the core areas of the website...
