Power after a flood

When Daniella Fenster and her Global Sustainability Challenge teammates started looking for ideas for a project last year, they kept returning to news reports of people going without power for days or weeks after floods. Stories from Hong Kong, Jamaica, India, and across the United States inspired them to consider how they could improve people’s lives in the aftermath of a deluge.

They decided to pursue a decentralized, affordable technology to generate power for essential household needs.

“If your phones are dead and you can’t move, you don’t know any information. Where is there food? Where’s the fresh water? What are the resources if someone’s hurt?” said Fenster, a materials science and engineering major. “Those were the big problems we were pinpointing for the days after a flood.”

Fenster and her team members – all students from different disciplines in the Stanford School of Engineering – considered what resources would be readily available after a flood in coastal areas. Their varied skills and interests helped them think about the problem from different angles and come up with a solution involving an electrochemical device known as a fuel cell. The fuel cell uses the salt in seawater to generate electrochemical energy, then uses the current in a river or flood stream to generate mechanical power.

“You don’t need anything other than the fuel cell that we will make,” she said. “It’s something you store in your closet and use to give you extra power from the resources that are on hand after a flood.”

The fuel cell’s use of local, water-based resources gives it resilience over other solutions: Flood damage and cloud cover can knock out solar power, and fuels like diesel can be difficult to deliver or become contaminated. The fuel cell also reduces fossil fuel costs and emissions.

Fenster said participating in the Global Sustainability Challenge has helped her build on what she’s learned in the lab and the classroom. She’d worked on “nitty-gritty material science and chemical engineering projects,” but the challenge has helped her practice systems-level thinking.

The team members met as first-year students in the Explore Energy House. They decided to pursue a project in the challenge’s Adaptation and Resilience category to stretch beyond their academic experiences. Much of their curriculum had focused on the rapid growth and commercialization of renewable energy sources like solar and wind, Fenster said, but the fuel-cell project drove them to think more about practicality and impact for people experiencing the direct effects of climate change.

“Every step of the way, we were asking ourselves, ‘Is the solution going to help people?’” she said. “We weren’t just going down the path of pushing our idea through, no matter what.”

Being among hundreds of teams working toward common goals as part of the Global Sustainability Challenge has emphasized to Fenster the importance of thinking about climate change as a global problem.

“The challenge is an in-your-face reminder that there are students all around the world focusing on the climate crisis, which I think is fantastic,” she said.