Off-grid Charging with Solar PV

A life-long friend sent me this piece on off-grid charging with solar PV, from the online section of the Philadelphia Inquirer, the main newspaper where I’m from. In fact, the guy featured in the article lives in Glenside, walking distance from the house in which I grew up.

It’s hard for me to get excited about this business concept. We Earthlings don’t need expensive solutions to provide a few milliwatts of solar power to charge our cell phones; we need inexpensive solutions to provide terawatts of power (that’s 10^15, 1 quadrillion, 1,000,000,000,000,000 times greater than milliwatts) to power our transportation, building HVAC and lighting, and industrial applications.

Is a university really going to plunk down $12,500 for an unattractive thing they can install on the quad for students who can’t get back to their dorms?  I doubt it.  But I know the world has a strange fascination for stuff like this, (e.g., wearable PV — pictured above — photo credit: GizMag), so I suppose I say mazel tov.