This article is about the benefits of a specific class of product- solar power battery chargers. It is also about how we, as consumers of electricity, can take responsibility for changing the culture of energy use. It’s becoming more and more apparent that our traditional energy reserves are growing more and more scarce.
Individually and collectively, we need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. The evidence for the environmental effects of carbon fuels is starting to mount up, and if you’ve had to pay a utility bill recently you’ll know that energy is getting more expensive!
It’s tempting to feel powerless, that we can’t make a difference. This picture of us trapped into our traditional lifestyles, our traditional power sources, until governments change things isn’t necessarily true.
What more and more people are coming to realise is that it is increasingly easy to take small steps in the right direction now. You don’t have to have a wind turbine attached to your house, or be some hippy living off-grid in the Arizona desert to make use of alternative sources of energy. In many ways, the smallest changes are the most important- the growth of a commercial market for alternative energy is what will stimulate Big Business into creating accessible products.
One of the easiest forms of energy for the modern consumer to access is Solar power. Interest in solar power was first stimulated in the oil price crises of the 1970s, and the technology received a lot of support interest from both the public and scientific areas. The hand-held calculator powered by a simple photo-voltaic cell is a common example of the technology developed at that time. These days, a greater variety of products are available, objects with solar cells attached which will never need to be connected to the mains.
There’s also technology which lets you capture solar energy and use it in other devices. A good example of this is the solar power battery charger, which can be built to a variety of different power levels, and attached to all sorts of devices, to either provide them with power as they operate or to charge them up. A lot of devices, such as laptops or mobile phones, are designed to store charge whilst attached to a power source, and then to operate independently. They’re also built with energy efficiency in mind, and often only very small amounts of power to operate.
They don’t care if the electrical current is generated in a power station by the burning of fossil fuel, or the affect of the sun’s rays onto a treated silicon cell. What’s more, last time I checked no-one charged you for being out in the sun! The only issue is a technical one- to have the right transformer in place so that the current generated is compatible with the device you’re looking to power.
To conclude, solar power battery chargers aren’t going to save the world, or the energy crisis, on their own. What they will do is provide small savings here and there for the consumer, and reduce the demand for fossil fuel by small steps. That’s how we change the world- one tiny step at a time. We might save money doing it, too!
