A new millimeter/submillimeter-wave telescope is being constructed for deployment at the NSF South Pole research station. This telescope, with a 10-meter clear aperture, is designed for conducting large area surveys with unprecedented sensitivity to low surface brightness emission such as primary and secondary CMB anisotropy. The first camera for the new South Pole Telescope (SPT) will be a 1000-element bolometer array designed to conduct a blind survey over a few thousand square degrees, searching for galaxy clusters through their Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect. The survey should find many thousands of clusters with a selection criterion that is remarkably uniform with redshift. Armed with redshifts obtained from optical/IR follow-up, the survey yields should allow tight constraints to be placed on the equation of state of the dark energy. I will discuss the science goals of the first-generation SPT camera and the key design features and novel technologies that will allow the SPT to achieve these goals, and I will note some of the major observational and theoretical challenges that we must overcome to turn SPT observations into constraints on dark energy.