“Our family often visits India in the summer. If you’ve ever been there, the summers are scorching, and they always have these power cuts,” she said. “I was like, ‘Why don’t they have instant access to the electricity grid? What if you could create an off-grid solution to this problem?’ ”
So Mendu decided to be a part of the solution and designed an affordable device capable of generating clean energy.
Her innovation recently earned her a spot as a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Class of 2017. The 14-year-old engineer is the youngest person named to the list.
Previous Forbes 30 under 30 winners have included Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, “Saturday Night Live” star player Kate McKinnon, rapper Chance the Rapper and YouTube phenom Michelle Phan. This year the competition was intense with more than 15,000 nominations for 30 spots in 20 categories, for a total of 600 honorees.
Mendu was selected for the Energy Industry Sector for creating HARVEST, a bio-inspired energy device that uses solar and wind power to capture energy in the form of wind, rain and sun — and converts it to power. She currently is working to commercialize her device.
“Whether you realize it or not, we are facing a global energy crisis,” she said.
“Over 1.2 billion people in the world lack access to electricity. And for those of us who do have access to electricity, 93 percent of it comes from non-renewable resources that are both harmful to the environment and are also depleting,” she said. “Only 7 percent of it comes from renewable sources of energy. … The reason why we are unable to apply renewable sources of energy in such a widespread application is due to some of its limitations.”
Initially, her project focused on creating a wind energy harvesting device applicable in urban areas and at low wind speeds by using piezoelectricity, or the electric charge that accumulates in certain materials caused by applied mechanical stress.
“I wanted to help mitigate the global energy crisis by creating a device utilizing piezoelectricity materials that are both eco-friendly and cost efficient,” Mendu said. “I decided to utilize this by applying the vibrations of low wind speeds and just general ambient environmental energy around us and create electricity in that form.”
Her piezoelectric wind-energy device secured her a place as a finalist in last year’s Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge.
Then Mendu opted to expand the design to include solar energy with HARVEST. This device utilizes “solar leaves” to gather vibration energy, so that when it’s rainy, windy or sunny, the device can gather energy. The device costs Mendu just about $5 to create.
“I decided to create a flexible array of photovoltaics along with wind power to create a way for us to easily incorporate green energy into our every day world,” she said. “In our rapidly growing 21st century, an efficient, renewable source of energy is necessary to resolve our energy crisis.”
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