@Fletcher

I have misunderstood you initial statements, but your phrasing was, in fact, awkward. Usually continious power generation is talked about in terms of ‘capacity’ or ‘xGW facility’.

The concept of energy prizes is flawed because it means that investors have to assume a big risk for a big payoff, since the prizes for energy generation are in billions, as are the development costs. The payoff incentive is there already, as the breakthrough that makes energy cheaper than current methods of generation would allow the inventor to swim in money. The issue is risk. Investors are unlikely to invest billions of dollars into high risk enterprises. It could have made sense if the prizes were set according to certain benchmarks or breakthroughs, but R&D is not that predictable, so, again investors could not estimate the likelyhood of getting the prize. It would also allow for giving away prizes for technologies that are not utilizable.

Furthermore, unless you convert our current fleet of vehicles into EVs to a significant extent, the dependence on foreign oil still exists.

One thing that I’ve found interesting in your post is electro-static confinement. I haven’t heard about it before, and its an interesting technology, however currently it is at 0.1% efficiency of what it needs to even break even. POP looks promising, but it would likely take longer to develope than tokamak, and tokamak has a much larger generation capacity due to its design.

US president still can’t repeal laws.