The Power of Play
At first blush, SOccket sounds like a crazy fun gadget dreamed up by a zany scientist. SOccket is a soccer ball that generates electricity by harnessing kinetic energy from game play.
It's the brainchild of four women who met at an engineering class at Harvard University. To them, SOccket is far from a frivolous toy, it's a practical way to exploit the popularity of soccer to generate cheap electricity in some of the world's poorest places.
I learned about SOccket today at Family Energy Day hosted by the California Center for Sustainable Energy and chatted with Hemali Thakkar, one of the co-founders who is from Orange County.
SOccket is still a prototype, but it has garnered some impressive supporters, including the Clinton Global Initiative University and Harvard Institute for Global Health.
The invention has the potential to improve lives in poor soccer-loving nations, such as Liberia and Nigeria, by providing clean, low-cost electricity to power lights, radios and cell phones. Developing nations now rely heavily on dirty fuels, such as kerosene, for lighting homes.
SOccket uses inductive coil technology. When the ball is kicked, a magnet inside the coil moves, generating electricity.
Thakkar visited Liberia this past summer to test SOccket in a rural village. "Most of the kids I talked to, they played soccer four hours a day. They would come home from school and do some chores, and they would play soccer three or four hours a day."
As it stands now, the alpha 2 version of SOccket can power a small LED light for three hours after 15 minutes of play. But the device, about 4.5 ounces heavier than a regular soccer ball, is not very durable and is configured only to provide DC current. It also costs $70 each to manufacture, in part because only a limited number is being made for testing.
Thakkar knows she and her co-founders still have a lot of work to do to make the SOccket viable. Their goal is to bring down the cost of a SOccket ball to $10 to $20 a piece, configure it both for AC and DC currents, and roll out the product by next summer.
"We are going to try to improve durability and decrease the weight and improve electricity storage and capture," she said.
Three of the co-founders of SOccket have graduated and have full-time jobs. Thakkar is the only one who is still a student at Harvard. She's slated to graduate with a degree in global health in 2011. It's remarkable how far the four women have gone, given that SOccket is a project that they've been doing on the side.