Teams of college students converged on the nation’s capital this week to exhibit their ideas for saving the world, or at least sustaining it.
At the National Sustainable Design Expo, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency event on the National Mall, 50 groups that emerged from a nationwide competition offered their “green” designs for cleaner water, cleaner air, renewable fuels and environmentally friendly construction. The teams already had won $10,000 to expand their concepts and contraptions; the expo offered an opportunity to compete for another $75,000.
The EPA is looking for innovative ways to “protect and maintain the quality of life and do it in a green way,” said Christopher Zarba, acting deputy director at the National Center for Environmental Research. Six teams of finalists were to be named winners during a ceremony Wednesday night.
The group from the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., developed a wave energy harnessing device, on the theory that the energy available in ocean-surface waves “is more than enough to power all human energy consumption for the foreseeable future.”
The system works like this: A cable reel is attached to both a “dynamo” anchored to the sea floor and a buoy floating on the water’s surface. The buoy bobsin the waves and pulls the cable, which turns wheels on the dynamo and generates electricity. A farm of 5,000 devices would produce similar power to that of a nuclear power plant, said Michael Raftery, a research engineer at Stevens.
A trio of Duke University sophomores, Nicholas Millar, Devin McDaniel and Samantha Beardsley, developed a self-sustaining trailer that can be deployed by the federal government in the event of a Hurricane Katrina-like natural disaster. The solar panels provide most of the unit’s power and hot water; it can be tied to a power grid through a biodiesel generator; and a filtration system recycles water to reduce waste.
Converting the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s 20,000 existing trailers would cost about $2.9 billion, the students estimate. But an energy-efficient, easily dispatched temporary home with a 10- to 15-year life cycle offers a return many times over, they said.
“The payback is enormous,” Millar said, “so we do believe it is a good government investment.”
