Take your mobile off the grid…
by Nicholas Moore Eisenberger, New York City on 03.20.07
One of the things that give me the most hope about the future is that we really haven’t begun to tap the potential for reducing the amount of energy we consume in our lives. Even though nearly every major popular magazine in the last few months has published their top 10, 101, or 269 ways to go green, they’re still just scratching the surface of what can be achieved with a little ingenuity. So I am going to add one to the list that I haven’t seen yet. Take your mobile phone off the grid…
It might seem trivial, but it’s not. There are already nearly two billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide. And ninety percent of the world’s population is expected to live in an area with mobile phone coverage by 2010. While individual mobile phones do not consume a great deal of energy, most of us consume more energy than is necessary by leaving our phone chargers plugged in. On average, only 5% of the power consumed by phone chargers is in fact used to charge phones, while the other 95% is consumed by the charger when no phone is plugged in.
So what to do? Well, you can unplug your phone charger for starters. But that requires a good memory and a lot of bending over. I’ve come across a more convenient and even more sustainable option thanks to the solar bags produced by Voltaic Systems. Voltaic’s backpacks and briefcase-like messenger bags all come with built-in solar panels and a small battery. They also come with a slew of adapters, including a standard car lighter socket, an iPod plug, a USB plug that can be used to charge cameras and Blackberries, and a whole set of mobile phone adapters. This past holiday, we gave everyone at my firm (GreenOrder, an environmental strategy consultancy) a Voltaic bag as an end-of-year gift. As pictured above, a small solar farm quickly sprang to life, with everyone hanging their bags near the window to capture the sun (the bags pictured are outside because it was one of those abnormally warm winter days, but they can be charged inside just as well). We found that with just a few hours in the sun, we could charge our phones over night at home.
As gratifying as it was do walk the talk at work, people’s reaction to the bag on the street was even more remarkable. I’ve been stopped by everyone from Wall Street types, to taxi drivers, to tourists and street vendors. I was even “pulled over” once by the police. Everyone wants to know “what does that thing do?” and “where can I get one?” Somewhat surprisingly, the biggest fans seem to be the TSA screeners at the airport, who seem far more enamored with the concept than they are worried about the strange electronics embedded in my bag.
So in the end, taking my mobile phone off the grid has saved a little energy, sure. But what I’ve found most valuable is what it has revealed about people’s latent desire to try something new and be more efficient and self-sufficient. My solar powered bag and phone (and iPod and camera) have demonstrated that more people than you might think want to know how to go green. I’ve even thought of putting a new signature line on emails from my Blackberry phone to help spread the word about what you can do… “This Blackberry is solar powered by a Voltaic Systems bag.” And as a bonus, when I’m in the airport and running out of juice, I don’t need to vamp a plug anymore – because I’ve now got a truly mobile mobile.
I like the idea of the voltaic bag but I don't want a Lithium Ion battery which will need replaced in just a few years. I'd much prefer a pack of AA NiMH's so they will last longer and be easier to replace.
Great idea! I'd love to see everyone disconnect from that umbilical cord going into the wall.
That cord is the very end of a long string snaking back to the electrical power plant fed by fossil fuels, delivered by tanker ships or trucks from militarized Mideast zones or strip mined coal fields. That entire chain of supply is dominated by nasty people and governments who don't like us and would abuse us for money at the drop of a hat.
Physically tapping into that electrical wall plug joins us tangibly (not rhetorically or metaphorically) into a whole world of awfulness. Maybe we can't get all our stuff unplugged from that political and ecological mess. But we can start with our mobile electronic devices. Wouldn't it be nice to say our cellphones & ipods have only been fed with pure, wholesome self-generated electricity? It's a start
I like that the cells are replaceable, but why don't they come in something besides black?
I like to keep all of my electronics on power strips that are easy to switch off. Why leave your wireless router broadcasting all day? Just flick the switch when you need it and turn it off when you're done.
This idea can go well beyond cell phone chargers to all of the electronics in your house -- minus clocks and anything that will reset without electricity.
I have to leave my wireless running all day since my wife is at home. My solution was to build a "solar UPS". Basically a store bought UPS is a battery charger, battery and inverter and all but the expensive online UPS's just bypass the battery unless they loose incoming power then switch over to battery power, so while connected to power noise still gets through. An online UPS does not bypass the battery instead running the inveter all the time. I was going to make somehting similar to this by feeding solar into the charge controller charging the battery then run my router and cable modem off the battery. If my battery got too low and the solar couldn't keep up with the load then the low voltage drop out on the charge controller would kick in line power to give it a boost. Then by monitoring the amount of help it needed I would know if I needed more solar panels. Problem I ran into now is the price of the solar panels I was looking to buy have tripled in price since last year so I haven't found anything affordable.