At the age of 15, he built an ocean generator with a PVC pipe and 10 euros. A decade later, it continues to spark interest in the sector

It was 2015 when a high school student from Boca Raton, Florida, presented to a jury of scientists a prototype built with parts that anyone could find in a hardware store. Your project He was trying to solve how to generate electricity where power lines do not reach, taking advantage of the movement of the sea. There was no laboratory or company behind it, just 12 dollars in budget (about 10 euros at the current exchange rate). Interestingly, his idea is the principle on which an entire emerging marine energy industry is built.

Who is he and what did he do?. Hannah Herbst was 15 years old when she devised BEACON (Bringing Electricity Access to Countries through Ocean Energy), a probe capable of transforming the movement of ocean currents into electricity. The device earned him the title of “America’s Top Young Scientist” and $25,000 in the 2015 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge, after competing against eight other finalists at the 3M innovation center in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

How it all started. As Herbst shared at the time, she maintained contact by postal mail with a nine-year-old girl in Ethiopia, who lived with almost no access to electricity. “I can’t even imagine a day without light,” came to declare Herbst herself told Business Insider when recalling their conversations. She wanted to build something that could bring energy to communities like her friend’s, without depending on expensive infrastructure or conventional electrical grids.

This is how your invention works. The mechanism is easy to explain precisely because its beauty lies in its simplicity. A 3D-printed propeller is placed on one end of the device; When the water current makes it rotate, a system of pulleys transmits that movement to a Pelton wheel, a type of hydraulic turbine widely used in engineering, connected to a generator. All housed inside a PVC tube.

This means that clean and continuous electricity can be obtained, without depending on the sun or the wind. Herbst tested the prototype on the Intracoastal Waterway of Boca Raton, where he managed to light LED bulbs. It is not that Herbst suddenly provided a new physical principle, but it is very interesting how his proposal took that physical principle to a much smaller and cheaper scale.

It didn’t stop at a school fair model. With the help of Jeffrey Emslander, a 3M scientist who served as a mentor during the summer before the contest, Herbst wanted to take his idea to a larger scale version. According to picked up Business Insider’s calculations suggested that the expanded design could generate enough electricity to charge three car batteries in less than an hour, enough energy to power water desalination pumps, blood centrifuges in rural clinics, or coastal navigation beacons.

Why does it matter? More than ten years later, this approach (small, autonomous and cheap devices for areas where installing a conventional electrical network does not pay off) is exactly the direction that the marine energy industry is taking. The United States Department of Energy estimates that the technical resource available in US waters equals approximately 57% of all the country’s current electricity generation, according to data from its Hydropower and Hydrokinetic Office, although it warns that the technology is still in an early stage of development.

Between the lines. Turbine technology for marine currents already existed and was being researched on an industrial scale long before Herbst put it into practice. Although what is striking is that the direction in which the sector is now moving, with smaller, modular devices designed for areas without an electrical grid, instead of gigantic and centralized turbines, coincides with the idea that that teenager intuitively applied in her garage.

In this sense, several companies already operate under this same approach, although on a very different scale. ORPC (Ocean Renewable Power Company) has deployed a hydrokinetic device in Igiugig, Alaska, since 2019 to supply that remote community, and is preparing new projects in rivers in Louisiana, Canada and France. Ocean Motion Technologies develops small wave generators controlled by artificial intelligence to power ocean sensors. and Hydrokinetic Energy Corp. works in turbines that take advantage of the Gulf of Mexico current.

On the other hand, it should be noted that Herbst has never intended to patent his invention or keep it exclusive. “When I finish developing it, I’m going to release it openly… everyone in the world will be able to have access to the bill of materials and the data that I got, everything necessary to make this device,” explained Herbst to Fast Company magazine in 2015.

And now what. Herbst has continued to broaden his horizons ever since. He trained in information systems at Florida Atlantic University, years later developed an antibacterial bandage inspired by shark skin and, now in the field of medical technology, created AutoTQan automatic tourniquet designed to save lives in severe bleeding situations. In fact, she is currently listed as founder and CEO of this medical initiative.

Cover image | Medill News Service

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