Every major idea for alternate fuels is practically impossible (and when you take the human condition/profit/tradeoffs/greed into it, completely impossible) and the tradeoffs are all horrible with anything other than solar.

Biofuels cause food displacement, land clearing, and are a net "bad" for the environment. Plus they would force people living on subsadies to work for a living and they have lobbies to prevent such things from happening.

Hydrogen is dangerous to store, and ALL US hydrogen regulation plans have language making it illegal to refill your car at home and the requirement for all hydrogen cars to have proprietary fittings that you can't "just tap into" (Ie you can't make and compress your own. ( that cuts into business profits and taxable income so it won't happen.) They'll set an arificially inflated (no pun intended) price on it and while it may potentially be better for the environment, unless you're using solar to create your hydrogen,..you're still burning power somewhere in the mix.

Solar is free, safe, and easy. Efficiency on solar panels grows daily (and as mentioned in another article) the US has no shortage of space to put solar panels/farms/arrays

The only way to change to ANY different fuel source though is to be able to fix the price of oil and obtain it from non-foreign sources.
If oil was at a set price (even a high set price that could only go down) that would allow enough stability politically to be able to truly invest in infrastructure. (if you're paying $3.00/gal today and prices drop back down under a dollar US citizens aren't going to be falling over themselves to invest in alternate fuel.

Go with something like changingworldtechnologies, (Someone explain to me the US government is roadblocking them at every turn again??) get our mass gas and oil from recycling (killing two birds with one stone) fix the prices and wean ourselves off slowly (domestic production would insure price and political stability and maybe get us out of the Middle East)
After we've developled and implemented solar/nuclear infrastructure we then sell off our excess to the rest of the world at a profit as well as insure dirt cheap oil for the things that still need it. It would take about 15 years or so to get "in full gear" but it would be 100% beneficial. The only people who would lose out would be big oil and those who have their bread and butter based on ties with the middle east.

Unfortuately they alone weild enough power to topple governments so.... cest la vie.

That's the best plan I could come up with and while it's a LONG TERM solution, I think it's about the only one that could actually work in the real world.

Actually if it were attached to a system that could determine which source was better at the time, then switch I think just putting a strip of this down the emergency lanes/inside lanes of all the major roadways in the US would probably provide some insane power. During the day gather sunlight and then in the hours and hours after that the roads maintain heat, gather ambient heat then.

If you could actually "pave" the roads with a photovoltaic material THEN you're talking serious energy. Major Highways see sunlight through most of the day and have a combined 4,042,778 miles of interstate highways,...that's a really good place to start.

Of course there are new and proven building materials for highways right now that won't get approved because their repair cycle is so long it puts people out of work on a massive scale, so whoever builds this new energy tapping roadway better plan some obsolescence into it or it will never fly. (Yay for government efficiency!)

I've always thought that every satellite/ship/station should be deigned with some kind of slow drive system and/or quick "death release" system that would cause them to fire out and land on or near the same spot on the moon. Then when/if moon bases/operations were a go you would have a huge stockpile of recycle materials to get you going. I'm sure the logistics are insane, but it seems even some kind of "bag it and sling it" system to shift orbital debris into a usable stockpile of stuff would make sense.

Of course I'm also for railgunning all our nuclear waste into the sun so,...practical isn't my middle name.

I looked at the contest and at the time I was considering entering there was just too much of a lack of information. I found it insane that a company that huge running a "contest" with large sums of money involved had a rules/regs sheet that looked like "Dave in shipping" had typed it up. I had several good ideas (vetted by industry professionals) that I finally didn't enter because the "For additional questions send mail here" people never responded to any of my mails asking basic rule/regulation questions (most of the information a serious "inventor" would need was lacking in the 1 page rules sheet they offered. They may have updated by now but I got a bad vibe from this at the start. If you can't even set up the contest right, the followthrough is suspect from the start.

They had no information at all concerning simple questions such as:

"Winnings":
How are the prize winnings distributed (are they administered by google or payed out as services or cash or ? (it never said)

Intellectual property:
Is this (they typical)internet VC front where they dole out some prize and in exchange you get all rights to IP and any revenues/future development etc that come from it? The HP "Design our next computer" contest comes to mind. They outsourced years of R&D time to tens of thousands of people on the internet and gave away 1 laptop to 1 person for the privilege of working for them.

I mean,..at least the Tribecca film "Pitch a movie" contest has the decency to tell you in the rules and regulations that by "winning" you're signing your life away to them.