Portable Solar Energy Systems

One of the things that makes solar power really useful to a great number of people is the portability. From folding solar panels for hikers to recreational vehicle (RV) solar kits, there are portable solar energy systems made for just about every mobile activity under the sun.

If you’re not particularly interested in putting all the components of a system together, there are some handy kits you can buy that have all the components you’ll need, already assembled and ready to go. They come in configurations from just a few watts, as in the case of the solar bathing suit designed to power an iPod, to an 1100-watt RV system, designed to run a small refrigerator for weeks on end. No matter your activity or power consumption needs, if you’ve got the cash, solar power can be yours in a very handy pre-designed system.

Of course, these kits are more expensive than if you purchased all the pieces separately, but they do have the advantage of being almost instantaneous in their set up. As solar panels, especially the thin-film amorphous silicon (a-Si) types, get more efficient and flexible, the application of wearable solar panels becomes more complex and varied. Consider the solar backpack that could barely support a phone and an iPod in mid-2005, but was powering laptop computers just a year later.

Lightweight solar has a lot to thank NASA and their Spin-off programs for. Recent developments have sent vast flexible, holographic solar panels into space during just the last few years – on their way to the outer edge of our solar system. Surely powering a microwave oven while driving the Kansas Turnpike isn’t a stretch.

Of course, it’s all a matter of cost, and these systems do remain a bit on the spendy side. That certainly hasn’t stopped thirty-something programmers from snapping up solar gadget-powering messenger bags at several hundred dollars a pop, though most people continue to wait for the price to really come down.

Unfortunately, the market for solar panels is so heavy on the demand side, there’s going to be little movement in the price for some time until production ramps up even faster than is expected in the next 5-years. The hope is that energy intensive processes such as building factories will be largely over by the time petrol gets Very, Very expensive (well, for the US anyhow).

In the meanwhile, much of the recent innovation in solar technology has, thus far, really only been affordable by people over 60 and a select few between 28 and 43. Should the price of petrol continue to rise as it has, it seems very likely that the price may go up once again until additional manufacturing capacity comes online between 2010 and 2012.