Designers and engineers turn their skills to developing new means of energy generation. Here are two recent approaches, the first, a product design student's concept to use a seesaw in African schools, from the BBC.

Design student Daniel Sheridan has created a simple see-saw which generates enough electricity to light a classroom. The device works by transferring the power, created by a child moving up and down on it, to an electricity storage unit via an underground cable. The Coventry University student has won £5,500 in funding to develop the idea.

The second is a wind turbine that can be built for less than $100 and has been developed by Engineers without Borders to be tested in Guatemala, from Wired.

Unlike the large-scale assemblies found in wind farms, the roughly two-foot-wide and three-foot-tall turbine has a vertical axis. McLean said that orientation worked better in the choppy conditions likely to meet the turbine out in the field, where it'll be bolted on to buildings, towers or even trees. ...The engineering team had to make their design simple enough that it could be assembled from cheap and widely available components.