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.

Taking it underground

Believe it or not, our modern world is supported by an energy grid that was originally designed by Thomas Edison in 1880. Say it’s not so!

Indeed, Edison’s design was never meant to service the large energy-gobbling population of the 21st Century. Demand for electricity is expected to increase by as much as 40 percent in the next two decades – more than twice the population growth rate.

Finding reliable, more eco-friendly solutions is essential, and proving to be challenging.

Building wind turbines and solar farms in the middle of nowhere sounds great. But it’s not easy to move all that clean energy to the urban centers that need it. Everyone may want the electricity, but they don’t want to look at the giant wind turbines and hire-voltage wires on their properties.

One of the solutions is to run the cable along a light rail line. While it means that lines would be out of the way, the idea was never implemented in California because it was thought that putting a power supply near public transit would cause safety issues.

How about along railroads or highways? Most transportation departments don’t want lines being run alongside freeways in case road expansion is needed in the future, and railways don’t always solve the problem of accessibility.

So what does that leave? Going underground.

California has approved the construction of an underwater trench dug by water jets. Although the 53 miles of cable will be complicated and costly to build and maintain, politically it is an ideal solution because the fish won’t complain.