Academic Programs > AGNR Academic Departments > ENST Home > About ENST > Dr. Lansing's Advisee Wins Competition To Light Up Homeland
Dr. Lansing's Advisee Wins Competition To Light Up Homeland
As a child growing up in Sierra Leone, Trevor Young had a life was circumscribed by an occasional three or four hours of electricity. That was on the good days, when his family could spring for fuel to run the generator outside their home.
These days, the situation in Sierra Leone is even more dire; what infrastructure there was has crumbled under 11 years of brutal war.
"Imagine a city full of cars with no electricity for traffic lights," Young says. "And no streetlights." In many rural areas, there is no electricity to run an overhead light or plug in a radio, let alone charge a computer or power a plant.
But Young intends to change all that.
The 33-year-old senior at the University of Maryland in College Park has a plan to light up the developing world -- one rural village at a time. A pipe dream? Not according to the university, which gave him $5,000 in seed money and two of its top prizes, totaling $25,000, in its annual business plan competition.
"I guess I am what you'd call a 'nontraditional' student," Young says.
He attends classes all day and drives a cab at night to help support his wife and four kids (DarVor arrived in late 2008). And somehow, in the course of doing homework, he has developed a plan to produce electricity through the construction of specialized micropower plants.
Young, an agriculture and natural resources major, makes it sound simple, sketching out the details of an enterprise that will convert a combination of palm fruit oil effluent and pig manure (or goat, cow or even human waste) into energy. He got the idea last year while considering an English assignment: Write about a problem and spell out a solution. Young bypassed conventional undergraduate problems -- star-crossed lovers, cruel parents, painful shyness -- and aimed higher, at world poverty.
"When you go back home to Africa, you feel guilty that you are living such a comfortable life in the United States and that people in Africa are seriously struggling," he says.
Young was 9 when his parents sent him from Sierra Leone, which was becoming increasingly dangerous in the years leading up to the war, to New Jersey to live with an uncle. His mother died of cancer shortly afterward, and his father died later of complications from a stroke suffered when rebels used him as a human shield in an attack on the capital during the war.
When the war ended, Young returned to his homeland and was deeply troubled by what he found, especially the amputee camps.
"I was one of the lucky ones, not to have been in the country during the fighting," he says. "Seeing how the people had suffered, I wanted to do something. And there was so much that just needed to be done."
He seized on one of the most intractable problems: the lack of electricity in rural areas.
At first, Young saw solar energy as an answer, as sunshine is plentiful in many parts of the world where there is little or no electrical power. But equipment costs would make it prohibitively expensive. So he turned to water. Hydropower could capture the energy in falling water through pipes and a simple turbine.
One of his professors urged Young to stay with the concept and enter the University of Maryland contest for emerging entrepreneurs. Then, while surfing the Internet one day, Young came across information that sparked an idea. What if he used biomass, the waste from processing a local agricultural product, and combined it with animal waste, capturing the gas, which is high in methane, as it decomposed? This natural gas could be used to generate electricity.
And what if he created a mill to process the agricultural produce -- in this case, palm fruit -- into an exportable, income-producing product for locals? Palm oil, used in soap, cosmetics and household cleansers, has rich commercial potential. And processing the palm fruit would produce enough fibrous waste to feed a power plant.
Bingo!
"Here, the local community is using resources in that community to improve the quality of life in that community," Young says.
In rural Sierra Leone, palm fruit often languishes on trees because it is too expensive for locals to transport it to the few commercial processing plants in urban hubs, and pressing it by hand is an arduous and time-consuming process, Young explains. But a mini-mill, costing about $140,000,
could generate income and electricity for residents.
Young is drawing on the expertise of Stephanie Lansing, an assistant professor of ecological engineering in the environmental science department, and is learning about the energy-generating potential of palm oil effluent.
"What's truly unique about Trevor's business plan is that he is synthesizing all this information and creating a full circle," Lansing says.
In addition to finding a renewable energy solution and infusing capital into the village, his plan would help clear waterways of discarded palm oil effluent.
"Basically, it closes the loop," Lansing says.
Young also will have the support of the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute, which runs the business plan contest and provides student entrepreneurs with advice, networking support and access to funding.
After his graduation at the end of the year, Young plans to move his family to Sierra Leone to start his company. An optimist, he said he has named the business after one of his daughters: Tseai, which means sunshine.
By Karen Houppert, The Washington Post
For more information, contact Kintija Eigmina, Web and Communications Coordinator
Last updated: 11/3/2009
