Shane Simonett | ILS 252 improves your world

Shane Simonett

ILS 252

sOccket Final Project

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, a group of girls were blasting the music of Britney Spears while working on a college project. They were tasked with solving the health problem of kerosene fume inhalation in the developing world. In the majority of Africa, kerosene is used to heat and light homes. This practice is found to be extremely carcinogenic. Burning a kerosene lamp in a single room house is found to produce the same amount of cancer causing compounds as smoking 40 cigarettes (Ezzati 2005). A similar health risk is shown in wood burning and diesel power generators which are also commonly found in Africa.

Back to the Britney Spears song, by listening to the music, the group came to the conclusion that the best way to solve this problem was to make a creative and fun solution. Fun solutions are much easier to implement than boring ones. So they created the sOccket.

The sOccket is a soccer ball that produces electricity through movement. Before you think it is a gimmick, it can produce enough electricity to power an LED lamp for 3 hours after only 15 minutes of using the ball (Clinton 2011). Jessica O. Matthews, one of the co-creators of this idea, developed the sOccket as a way to generate power because it was a fun activity with heavy participation in all of Africa. In this way the children of Africa can have fun with their normal leisure activities while bringing electricity to undeveloped areas. In one statistic, a quarter of the world’s people do not have access to electricity (Olejarnik 2010). With this electricity, people around the world could use light from electricity instead of carcinogenic sources, thus remedying a number of health problems.

Could one ball really make a difference? In reality it is more than one ball. In fact, there have been 1000 balls distributed throughout the world as of April 2011. Besides that, I truly believe that one ball can make a difference. The original intention of this project was to alleviate the problem of kerosene lamps as light in the homes of the developing world, but the applications are further reaching than that. With a consistent light, a child can read a book at night, acquiring knowledge at a faster than if he or she didn’t have that light. This simple act can improve the life of this child because education has always been the great leveler of society. It can create pathways to success where there was previously nothing. Ever the innovators, the sOccket team has plans to create attachments that can sterilize water and refrigerate small quantities. With modern conveniences like these in the works, the living conditions of the developing world are bound to improve. The sOccket can also serve as an inspiration to the thousands of children that play with it. These children will be the problem solvers for the next generation.

At a deeper level, the sOccket empowers the people of developing countries by putting in their hands a device in which to improve life on their own terms. Many projects used to improve life in developing countries around the world fall victim to condescension. Western engineers dictate the terms of how to improve the lives Africans without input from the people using the actual technology. The sOccket idea avoids this problem by using an already widely used practice to generate electricity. Also, the electricity from the sOccket comes directly from the feet of the people who play with it. This is significant because families in the developing world spend between 15-20% of their income on kerosene and other fuels (Barnes 1996). Much of this kerosene is also refined and shipped to developing countries, thus creating a further dependence on developed countries. The sOccket can help the developed countries of the world become more independent without changing the respective cultures.

After researching this idea and watching videos of children using the sOccket, it made me question the ways how the developed world produces energy. The most common way of producing energy in the world is through large coal burning power plants (Olejarnik 2010). Obviously burning non-renewable sources of energy is not sustainable and a change must happen. The most prominent challenge to this is that almost every source of renewable energy is not as efficient as the processes we currently use. We may never find energy as convenient as fossil fuels, so we must become accustomed to less efficient sources or become much less wasteful. There will not be a panacea for our energy problem. However, any small steps in the right direction are positive.

One large step I think we can take to fix our energy sustainability problems is to question the need for large energy producing facilities. This is a very difficult change to make because it requires a reorganization of or electric grid. It is also an important change to make for green energy production to work. According to The International Journal for Energy Research, 30-40% of developed countries electricity is lost due to transmission and distribution (Doukas 2011). Some of this lost energy is due to the distance the electricity must travel to its destination. In the current market, these losses must be manageable due to the availability of relatively low cost resources. Consider a market in which current fuels are more expensive. Can 30-40% of preventable energy loss be manageable? To fix this we must challenge the status quo, but for long term sustainability it is a must.

To fix the problem of energy losses, one solution would be to have more local energy producing facilities. This will have an impact in two ways. First, the losses in energy from transmission will be greatly reduced. Secondly and most importantly for sustainability, communities will have to responsible for the energy they create and consume and for the wastes it produces. At the present, power plants are built out of the way so that they can’t affect us with their wastes. We can take much less responsibility for wastes that we don’t directly have to see or deal with. A great way to avoid these wastes is to use green technologies like solar or wind power production facilities that are operated by the communities it serves. Although the efficiencies of green processes are not to the same standard of coal burning power processes, the shorter distance for electricity to travel will compensate. Also, green technologies will continue to become more efficient in the future.

What if we used many different small sources of energy instead of our current mass production? A technology developing at the New Jersey Institute of Technology has the possibility to create this vision. The product they innovated is a carbon nanotube sheet that can act as a solar energy collector and transmitter (Cheng 2007). This idea is revolutionary because this sheet can be applied to virtually any surface and generate electricity. The lead author and researcher, Somenath Mitra, envisions that “Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations.” The solar energy that falls on the earth in one hour is enough to power the world’s population for an entire year. If even a fraction of the energy can be captured by low-cost thin films like those describe by Mitra, much of our needs would be satisfied in an ecologically conscious way.

These ideas are just proposals to fix a problem that the whole world must solve. More importantly, I think we must question our values. Do we want to value cost effectiveness over sustainability? Do we want to value efficiency over health? With clearer values, we can make decisions to create a sustainable energy future. Eventually our values will change because there will be no other alternatives. Will it be too late before we change for the better?

Works Cited

Ahuja, Dilip. “Sustainable energy for developing countries.”SAPIENS. 2.1 (2010): n. page. Web. 7 Dec. 2011. <http://sapiens.revues.org/823>.

Barnes, Douglas. “RURAL ENERGY IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: A Challenge for Economic Development .” Annual Review. 21. (1996): 497-530. Web. 7 Dec. 2011. <http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.energy.21.1.497>.

Bill, Clinton. “Clinton Global Initiative.” Annual Meeting 2011. Clinton Foundation. New York. 4 April 2011. Lecture.

Cheng, Li. “A fullerene–single wall carbon nanotube complex for polymer bulk heterojunction photovoltaic cells.” Journal of Materials Chemistry. 23 (2007): 2406-2411. Web. 8 Dec. 2011. <http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2007/JM/b618518e>.

Doukas, H. “Electric power transmission: An overview of associated burdens.” International Journal of Energy Research. 35.11 (2011): 979-988. Web. 7 Dec. 2011. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu/doi/10.1002/er.1745/full>.

Ezzati, Majid. “Indoor air pollution and health in developing countries.” Lancet. 366. (2005): 104-106. Web. 7 Dec. 2011.

Mastel, Greg. “The Developing World and Climate Change.” International Economy. 23.2 (2009): n. page. Web. 7 Dec. 2011.

New Jersey Institute of Technology. “New Flexible Plastic Solar Panels Are Inexpensive And Easy To Make.” ScienceDaily, 19 Jul. 2007. Web. 8 Dec. 2011.

Olejarnik, Pawel . “World Energy Outlook 2009.”International Energy Agency. (2010): Web. 7 Dec. 2011.

For my semester long project, I have one personal goal. This goal is to make a tangible difference. I want to make a change that produces a physical result.

Through some research i have found a very interesting idea from students from Harvard. Their idea is to generate electricity through the movement of a soccer ball, specifically named the sOccket. The sOccket is primarily aimed at the needs of children in developing countries. In one statistic, 25% of the world’s children do not have consistent access to electricity. This solution is not meant to satisfy all of the developing world’s electricity needs, but it can give access where there previously was not. This technology is also surprisingly efficient. It can generate enough electricity to power an LED light for 3 hours.

I have been pondering whether an idea like this can make a difference, and I believe it can. With three hours of light, children can possibly read a book while it is dark out, furthering his or her education. Another possible application is to charge batteries that are used in small electric devices like cell phones, thus making long distance communication easier. One idea I have seen tossed around is using the electricity generated to power a water purification device. All three of these possibilities seem like very positive enhancements to the life of children around the world.

At this stage in the project, I’m focused on finding a group to distribute the sOccket to places where it could be used.

http://www.soccket.com/