Marisa Lu, Tiffany Lai and Susie Lee, three rising sophomores from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design, won the grand prize in the 2016 Geothermal Design Challenge.
The competition was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Geothermal Technologies Office, in partnership with the Center for Advanced Energy Studies and the Idaho National Laboratory. Teams explored the future of geothermal energy by designing an infographic to tell a compelling story.
Their final design, “Our Energy Future? A Down to Earth Solution” depicts a landscape of energy flowing from the sun down to the core of the Earth.
“I think something risky our team decided to do was incorporate information about other types of energy, so that our infographic wasn't only focused on geothermal energy,” Lai said. “We wanted to be realistic. We depicted statistics about current energy sources and what their status would be in the future.”
The team received a prize of $2,500 and expenses paid travel to the Geothermal Resource Council’s 40th Annual Meeting Oct. 23-26 in Sacramento, Calif.
