The Ferrous team is driven to make sure that for the 2.6 billion people living in energy poverty, modern energy satisfies all their basic human needs including dignity. The Ferrous team’s mission is to design and distribute sustainable, community-supportive, and capacity-building technologies. Ferrous is focused on addressing the current market’s failure to identify and respond to culturally significant needs that the western world has overlooked. A clothing iron compatible with modern energy technology called the Alternative Iron is Ferrous’s first product. With this appliance, Ferrous can rectify the disconnect between social need and technological capacity to ensure that each and every one of its beneficiaries can claim a larger slice of dignity.
In times of drought, reducing water use is crucial. The product, Equa, will raise awareness by collecting and displaying real-time data during showers to inform users of their water consumption. Easily attached to a shower wall, Equa displays real-time user data including temperature, liters of water used, and carbon dioxide emissions that are based off of how much energy is being used to heat the water so that the person in the shower will know how much water and energy he or she is using. By visualizing the resources being consumed, the user will change his or her behavior in order to reduce his or her environmental impact. This simple investment will thus pay for itself over time and increase awareness of users’ impact on the environment.
The increased market demand for household cooking fuel in Kenya provides an opportunity to improve livelihoods and the environment. This project unlocks the potential in human feces and other waste streams by transforming it into an affordable household cooking fuel. Sanivation, a partner organization, produces charcoal briquettes derived from human and agricultural waste that is cheaper than traditional charcoal. These fuel briquettes produce less smoke than traditional charcoal, consequently reducing the users’ exposure to toxic fumes and reducing indoor air pollution. Feces to Fuel aims to aid Sanivation with the technical and design work necessary to expand their business and scale production to 180 tons of fuel derived from waste products per month.
Providing reliable, sustainable and environmentally friendly energy is a significant global challenge today. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that the energy consumption for consumer electronics will be doubled in 2022. Since these electrical devices are predominantly battery driven, it creates a large environmental burden. In addition, the renewable energy solutions currently proposed (such as solar panels and PZT materials), are not environmentally benign. This project seeks to reduce this environmental burden by developing a bacteriophage-based piezoelectric generator to convert the human body’s daily activities ( such as walking) to electricity. Since bacteriophage is a natural material and biotechnology techniques enable large-scale fabrication of gene-modified phages, it potentially offers an environmentally friendly and simple approach to green-energy generation. This project hopes to develop such phage-based electrical generator to power electrical devices by harvesting peoples’ daily movements.
The goal of the Biodiesel Project is to provide UC Berkeley with a sustainable means of acquiring biodiesel as a cleaner, alternative energy source for use in campus vehicles and equipment. This self-sustaining initiative will provide a fulfilling hands-on experience for Berkeley engineers, educate Berkeley students about renewable energy resources, and reduce the consumption of fossil fuels. This will be accomplished through the recycling of waste cooking oil (WCO) from local campus dining facilities. The process involves filtering the recycled oil and producing biodiesel product through a chemical reaction. The biodiesel product will then be stored and made ready for campus distribution. Ultimately, the project will not only make UC Berkeley a more sustainable campus, but also will also educate and inspire the Berkeley community to turn towards green energy and sustainability.
The Food Bikery seeks to prove that food bikes are an economically viable, safe, and legal alternative to food trucks. In transitioning mobile food off of trucks and onto bicycles, the Food Bikery will: 1. Lower oil consumption; 2. Stimulate economic opportunities for low-income food entrepreneurs; 3. Increase physical well-being and health; 4. Foster awareness about the power of bicycles. The Food Bikery will harness the positive aspects that food trucks foster (economic opportunity, bringing fresh food into “food deserts” and community space), while minimizing their harmful environmental impacts. A prototype will be built of a scalable, turn-key food bike that can be used as a model to boost small business ownership among aspiring, environmentally conscious entrepreneurs, while shifting the current mobile food-business portfolio towards a low-carbon model.
Traditional lithium-ion batteries are produced at an increasing rate and each year at the end of their lives, they introduce over a hundred million pounds of chemical waste into the environment. The project’s main objectives are to develop a supercapacitor that serves as an energy storage alternative to traditional mobile device batteries and to create a paradigm shift in how people understand energy storage. The project aims to engineer an energy storage alternative that can be manufactured with little to no impact on the environment, produce a nominal amount of chemical waste, be fully charged in seconds and supply power for long periods of time.
In developing countries, electricity is often a luxury. People living in off-grid communities are not able to have a refrigerator, even though it is often the appliance they want the most. By integrating energy generation, storage and use into the same appliance, Solidge, an off-grid, solar-powered refrigeration system, solves grid unreliability by simply not using the grid. Solidge users can safely store food, unsold crops and vaccines for longer periods of time. Solidge will directly increase off-grid communities’ health and overall lifestyle by providing them with an affordable refrigerator. Solidge will first deploy in Morocco, taking advantage of the region’s sun and accessibility, as well as gather user feedback and refine Solidge’s design. However, Solidge has a broader mission. Designed from the ground up to become a globally deployable unit, Solidge will provide off-grid refrigeration for developing and developed countries alike.
Unlike chemical batteries that have a limited power output and diminishing cycle lives, flywheel batteries can supply quick surges of power in milliseconds with a reliable 20-30 year lifespan. The small footprint of flywheel batteries makes them easily deployable in any environment. Near Zero’s rapid ramping abilities, high cycle life, and low maintenance make it an ideal supplement to current regulation plant operations. While current installed storage capacity is seeking to compete with fossil fuel regulation plants, Near Zero aims to enable more efficient operation of these plants in a collaborative integration. The ability to provide both energy absorption and generation services at fast ramp rates means that less capacity is needed per regulation event, which enables the plant to increase the number of ancillary service market bids and reduce idle time. While the flywheel is ideal for the initial ramping of supply, Near Zero’s customers will increase asset utilization after the ramping period has ended or when installed flywheel capacity has been discharged.
