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A native of Florida, US, Hannah Herbst, 17, uses water power to deal with energy poverty. Herbst has risen to fame with the development of BEACON, an ocean energy probe (探测仪) that seeks to offer a stable power source to developing countries by using untapped energy from ocean currents.
She tells Teen Vogue, “I was really involved in theatre and athletics and I’m still really into those things. When I was in seventh grade, I was put into a summer camp. The minute I got there I realized that I was the only girl in the programme. I wanted to quit at that moment. But my dad told me, ‘Just try it.’ I tried it for that day and it changed my life.”
“At the camp, we started building the robots, which is something I had never done before but many of the boys had, and I realized it was a platform for problem­solving. We were solving simple tasks like how to push a robot off a platform. Learning from my partners as well as online articles about how to programme and build was really interesting to me,” said Herbst.
Later that year, she received a letter from her pen pal, Ruth, who lives in Ethiopia, and learned that she was living in energy poverty with minimal access to electricity and medical supplies. “I knew that I wanted to do something to help, so I created BEACON,” she said.
The device is made from 90% recycled materials easily found throughout the world, including 2­litre bottles and recycled spoons. It costs 12 dollars to make and can produce enough electricity to power an LED light. Hannah imagines BEACON being used in developing countries to power pumps for fresh water and she is working on polishing it to get it available to people all over the world.