Fellow Story
Orosz's company profiled on Discovery.com
About 1.4 billion people in the world have absolutely no access to electricity at all and even more have extremely unreliable access. Additionally, there are some 30,000 clinics and 60,000 schools around the world that lack access to electricity.
A nonprofit start-up company, called Solar Turbine Group or STG International, run by MIT engineering PhD candidate Matthew Orosz and his colleagues has developed an alternative: a heat-powered generator that gets its energy from the sun. It's a system that uses mirrored parabolic troughs (see photo above) to capture sunlight and concentrate it on pipes at the center of the troughs. Fluid running through the pipes get heated to 320 degrees Fahrenheit.
