Teen funds small hydropower unit with pocket money

Nineteen-year-old Zoran Samardžić managed to tap electricity for lighting for a village house and front yard by designing and installing a turbine on the local water stream. He told RTRS television station he built and assembled all the parts with help of a few grownups and friends with more expertise.

The young man from Bileća in the southeast of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been interested in electricity since elementary school when he was making remote-controlled toy cars and other devices. Samardžić says the improvised small hydropower plant is his own Đerdap, a giant system on the Danube at the border of neighbouring Serbia with Romania. His renewable energy unit was done in one month and costed him all his savings and pocket money from many months, he added.

“Zoran’s power can do all sorts of things; it provides electric tension of 12 V and 90 amperes. It’s so powerful it can feed 5,500 LED lights. It can be used for a radio, too, and there are even TVs today which can work on that power. One can charge a mobile phone. There are no expenses and no pollution, which is the most important,” the physics enthusiast stressed.

His grandmother’s house in the village of Do at the spring of the Bregava river always has electricity now, while outages are frequent around it. Samardžić will start studies in electrical engineering in the autumn with the aim to build a proper, large hydropower plant one day.