U.S. Department of Energy Hydropower Collegiate Competition (HCC)
Team Name: Hopkins Hydropower Team
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
What are you hoping to get out of your Hydropower Collegiate Competition (HCC) experience this year?
Our team strives to not only learn more about the developing hydropower industry in the United States but also contribute valuable research, ideation, and innovation to the field. By doing so, we hope to advance hydropower as a leading source of clean, renewable energy in the United States.
Why should people care about hydropower?
Hydropower is already a significant renewable energy source in the nation and one of the few clean and reliable ways we can produce power. Moreover, only 3% of dams in the United States are currently being used for power generation, creating significant untapped potential.
Describe your project, objectives, and game plan:
Our project aims to power the local Liberty Dam to provide power to the Baltimore, Maryland, community. We created a siphon design, which we chose because it is modular, noninvasive, and addresses older dams’ deficiencies. We will utilize the advice and knowledge of local experts to guide us in our mission.
What steps are your team taking to ensure a diverse and inclusive team?
Our team includes members of all different majors and interests. However, our team is diverse in other ways as well, including in gender and ethnicity. Members of our team come from all over the United States, as well as Sri Lanka, South Korea, Ecuador, and Myanmar, and have lived in both rural areas and big cities. Although we bring a bank of diverse knowledge and experience to this project, we are also continuously looking for ways to broaden our hydropower perspective and understand how engineering decisions impact communities.
What are you most looking forward to with this year’s competition?
The goal we are looking forward to the most, this year, is to innovate the hydropower industry while learning about our own Baltimore community. We also can’t wait to meet other teams and see what ideas they bring to the table.
How did you get involved in HCC?
We are a new team and became involved through our Multidisciplinary Engineering Design course at Johns Hopkins University. We heard about seven different projects we could join—from making medical devices to feeding bobcats. However, our team members were unanimously drawn to this project as our first choice. We believe in using design principles to create solutions to daunting problems, and we all come from different backgrounds and enjoy working together to solve these problems, learning something while doing so.
If you had to choose a catchy slogan for your team, what would it be and why?
Our biggest strength as a team is that we all come from different engineering backgrounds and bring different levels of expertise, which adds greater depth and insight to our conversations. We are a highly multidisciplinary team. Thus, the catchy slogan, “We are multi-D, ready for a hydropower spree,” was born. Rhyming also adds a dramatic effect.
If you had to compare your technology or team to a fictional character, who would it be and why?
If our team were a team in the fictional universe, we would be Scooby Doo and the mystery gang. With five very different personalities and skill sets, we form an effective team that can sometimes come up with the most unexpected problem-solving ideas. Like the entire gang, we are on a mission to save the world—just through a hydropower solution instead.
What does the future of Earth look like with our hydropower solution?
Our solution will be affordable and modular enough to be implemented anywhere there is flowing water. Ideally, our single unit can be mass-produced and adapted to all sorts of dams worldwide, not just within the United States. Our product could allow areas highly dependent on fossil fuels to more smoothly transition to clean energy, harnessing untapped resources throughout all continents.
