Little Box Challenge

The Little Box Challenge was an engineering competition run by Google and the IEEE's Power Electronics Society.[1][2] The original challenge was posted on July 22, 2014 with modifications on December 16, 2014 and March 23, 2015.[3] Testing was in October 2015 at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. From the 18 finalists, CE+T Power's team called Red Electrical Devils won the $1 million prize, which was awarded to them in March 2016.[4]

The challenge was to build a power inverter that was about one tenth the size of the state-of-the-art at the time. It had to have an efficiency greater than 95 percent and handle loads of 2 kW. It also had to fit in a metal enclosure of no more than 40 cubic inches (the eponymous "little box") and withstand 100 hours of testing.[3]

The goals of the competition were lower cost solar photovoltaic power, more efficient uninterruptible power supplies, affordable microgrids, and the ability to use an electric vehicle's battery as backup power during a power outage. Google also hoped a smaller inverter could make its data centers run more efficiently.[1]

More than 100 international teams from university researchers and students to large companies and garage tinkerers entered the Google Little Box Challenge competition. Eighteen finalists were chosen in October 2015. These 18 teams entered the Challenge's final stretch by submitting their competition prototypes, which underwent Google's stringent test regimen. The results of this worldwide competition were announced at the ARPA-E 2016, March conference. Of the 18 finalists, only 3 teams passed every one of Google's test requirements, those being the top three finishers.

Google managed this contest poorly and even unfairly changed the specification several times, once close to a deadline, so that some of the engineering choices made by some teams turned out to be less than optimal after the changes, leaving no time to adjust. Finalists had to travel to Denver to deposit their prototypes for testing at their own expense. Google did not even allocate enough budget to offer evening drinks, let alone dinner.