Two green trucking ideas take €100,000 runner-up prizes

AMSTERDAM, 25 September 2009 – A nearly invisible rooftop wind turbine has won the €500,000 Postcode Lottery Green Challenge 2009.

"It's beyond a dream," said English entrepreneur Dean Gregory when Skype founder Niklas Zennström, a contest juror, announced his name. "This means we can focus solely on bringing our product the RidgeBlade to market." Gregory entered the Challenge on behalf of the English company The Power Collective Limited – after finding out about it two days before the deadline.

Each year, the Dutch Postcode Lottery gives away €500,000 to the inventor of the best climate-friendly invention.

For 2009, two one-time €100,000 prizes have also gone to runners-up, both services for the haulage industry. The online transport marketplace Shiply.com matches people shipping goods with truckers already going in the right direction, making the industry more efficient. The Ephicas SideWing truck trailer skirt lowers wind resistance by guiding airflow, cutting fuel use.

The RidgeBlade "has great potential to reduce emissions," said Greenpeace Netherlands' executive director Liesbeth van Tongeren, another juror, who read out the jury report at Friday's award ceremony. "The adaptation of an existing technology is innovative, and the production cost makes it affordable and attractive for consumers."

She said Shiply.com, already running in the UK, had "successfully applied a scalable business model to cut down on the extreme inefficiency of the transport sector." And the Ephicas SideWing "will greatly reduce carbon emissions in a sector where this is difficult to do."

The Postcode Lottery Green Challenge 2009 award ceremony took place on 25 September at the PICNIC media and technology event in Amsterdam. On the jury with Zennström and Van Tongeren were Dutch MP Kees Vendrik of the GroenLinks party, The Climate Group COO Jim Walker, and Media Republic CEO Bas Verhart.

The jury deemed all six finalist entries "excellent". The other three were Mootral, a feed additive that would drastically cut cows' methane output; SimGas, a biogas energy system for developing countries; and Open Road, an open-technology in-car device that would support CO₂-reducing applications.

Each year, the Postcode Lottery invites creative, innovative people all over the world to join the fight against climate change by entering the Green Challenge. The contest is open to anyone with an idea for a user-friendly emissions-reducing product or service.