Algae powered energy system by a 15-year-old

What were you interested in when you were in high school? Adventure, fast cars, pretty girls? How about algae? 

Javier Fernández-Han, a 15 year-old from Texas recently won the Invent Your World Challenge and its accompanying $20,000 scholarship for his boundary-pushing project. Known as the VERSATILE system, Fernández-Han has cleverly developed an algae-powered energy system. It produces food for both humans and livestock, treats waste, produces methane and bio-oil for fuel, contains greenhouse gases, and produces oxygen. 

And this isn’t an amateur science project held together with string and duct tape. Fernández-Han’s invention is a complicated system consisting of six subsystems, all intended to revolutionize the way in which the poor meet their basic needs in a sustainable way. There are bells; there are whistles; there are anaerobic digesters.  

More importantly, the system can be built in theory for around $200, which makes it an interesting prototype for developing countries seeking self-contained sources of power and waste treatment.  

One of the most appealing aspects of the invention is the PlayPump, which uses playing children to create energy. Kids play on the Merry-Go-Round and the machine pumps water. Ring around the Rosie. Pocket full of self-contained greenhouse gases. 

With livestock becoming more affordable due to the availability of algae as feed, livelihoods supported by income generated through the sale of excess methane, and air pollution reduced, maybe it should be called the Win-Win System. The teenage inventor believes that we are at the dawn of the algae era. Don’t laugh. Algae: it’s not just pond-scum anymore.