Clean Energy System Invented – By 15-Year-Old
In an amazing display of scientific understanding, ingenuity and green thinking, a 15-year-old boy has invented a complete energy system that runs on salt-water algae. Not only that, but it also produces food.
The incredible invention came as a result of Ashoka’s Invent Your World Challenge, which invests in young people worldwide. It sets the challenge of designing and launching their own social ventures, in an attempt to spark positive social change (and, not inconsequentially, provide great experiences for the young people involved).
Javier Fernández-Han’s system is called VERSATILE. It’s based on a salt-water- loving algae and is surprisingly efficient, because it’s made up of twelve parts in six different sub-systems that fit together into the whole. It starts with a digester that treats food scraps and sewage – which feeds the resulting gases into a gas-converter that converts the output into food for the algae and produces fuel to burn.
The fuel then runs methane-burning stoves, which are non-polluting and – as a bonus – also trap CO2, thus reducing eco-unfriendly emissions. Meanwhile, the algae is being fed in “bioreactors”: these contain only salt water and algae, but use sunlight, CO2 and some nutrients from those food digesters to produce biomass.
The system also runs flush latrines and uses the “PlayPump”, which is a device designed to produce power by children playing on it.
The amazing thing is that the system is scalable to large populations or a single house. It gives health benefits (cleaner burning stoves) at the same time as reducing deforestation for fuel needs and maybe even providing a source of income from excess algae production (for pharmaceuticals, for example). It produces electricity from the PlayPump that can be directed to LED lighting and even an extra source of fuel from algae oil.
Javier Fernández-Han’s next task, he says, is to develop a small version of the system for a single house – at an estimated installation cost of only $300. An incredible achievement.
Via Cleantechnica.
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