Energy is an expensive commodity, and one the poor often can’t afford enough of. And the whole climate change thing means a lot of the energy we can afford requires messing up the environment a bit, which is no good.
Luckily a young brainiac is on the job: 15-year-old Javier Fernández-Han has come up with a way of killing those two birds with one stone. His system, called VERSATILE, won Ashoka’s Invent Your World Challenge, and promises to help solve the energy needs of poor villages.
The system is composed of six subsystems:
- An anaerobic digester (breaks down sewage and garbage)
- A bio-gas upgrader (turns the breakdown products into food for the algae)
- Vented methane burning stoves (non-polluting carbon-capturing device)
- Saltwater algae bioreactors (grow algae and produce oxygen)
- Flush latrines (fairly self-explanatory)
- Playpumps (generators hooked up to children’s games, basically)
The pumps generate the energy to drive the system, and the other components harness this energy to treat waste, produce methane and bio-fuel, and serve as a food source for livestock and crop production. The system also produces oxygen and sequesters (a fancy term for traps) greenhouse gases.
So the short of it is this: happy playing kids drive a system that provides cheap, clean energy for a village, cutting down on deforestation, ozone emissions…and the electricity bill.
Good work, Javier!
