Planet-Cooling Technology at Your Fingertips
Here’s a charmingly altruistic idea for those of us who would love to help to green the grid to cool the planet but just can’t afford to invest in a full roof of solar panels just to lavish lots of climate-friendly electrons on others.
The Inlet-Outlet plug.
Lets say you have a little roll-up solar panel or solar-topped table or solar backpack charger that you regularly abandon at home while you are out at work during the sunny hours of the day.
It could be making useful electricity for someone else, right?
Just plug it in to this inlet/outlet socket and let it send its sun-harvested electrons out into the grid for others to use, while you are out of the house. (You’ll have to have this plug near the window, of course). And harvest your sunshine for the common good.
Perhaps your utility could be persuaded to credit you for the electrons you send out, and it could reduce the amounts you owe. If not, perhaps congress could help persuade it. You’d have to ask congress.
And maybe over the years you would wind up gradually acquiring enough of the little portable solar chargers to get to the point where you actually make quite a dent in your electric bill that way, by sending in these free electrons to counter the ones that you’ll use when you come home at night, yet you would never have had to come up with the financing for an entire roof- full of solar panels.
A really great idea. Kudos to Carla Diana and Jeff Hoefs of Smart Design for this decidedly Greener Gadget.
Via Ariel Schwartz at Cleantechnica
February 11th, 2009 at 10:34 am
I like this concept quite a bit. I have a Solio charger sitting in the car right now, doing nothing, because the only parking spot I could find is under a giant pine tree (and I’m in Canada, so the Sun’s angle doesn’t help), but this would be a great option for encouraging people to do more from home.
June 17th, 2009 at 6:01 am
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