Mobile Charger

Most of us take having access to electricity for granted.  Luckily for those who don’t have a reliable source of power or a plethora of sockets to hand, a Mr John Hingley doesn’t.  For the MD of Renovagen in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, has developed the Rapid Roll System, a ground breaking technology that allows solar panels to be rolled and unrolled like a carpet from a trailer in a matter of minutes, two to be precise.  The key behind the technology is the use of solar panels that are flexible.  This allows them to be rolled up which in turn enables more power capacity to be transported to where it is needed in double quick time.  For example, under the Rapid Roll System a typical 4×4 trailer can hold enough panels to power a 12 bed clinic or desalinate 25,000 litres of sea water a day.  “Compared with traditional rigid panels, we can fit up to 10 times the power in this size container,” said Mr Hingley.  And the technology is not a prototype years away from being used out in the field.  It is already being rolled out on Line Flat Holm, an island in the Bristol Channel which has been designated a site of special scientific interest.  With no mains electricity supply, the island depends on diesel generators and solar panels for power.  But according to Flat Holm team leader Natalie Taylor, as more people visit, balancing the need to generate more electricity while protecting the environment is a challenge. “As we promote the island more and we get more visitors here, there’s going to be a lot more demand for electricity so it’s really important that we’ve got a really high functioning system that can provide for those people,” she said. “From an environmental point of view we want to reduce the use of diesel generators so that we can have as small an ecological footprint as possible.”  Step up Rapid Roll.  Gareth Harcombe, energy and sustainability manager at Cardiff Council, said: “We were looking at solar and hydro, but that takes up a lot of land…So this was a question about how we could generate electricity in a way that was portable, so once the site is needed for something else it can be moved on.”  Not bad for an idea that Mr Hingley thought up while travelling five years ago.   The hope is that his concept of scaling up mobile solar technology could in future be used to provide power to areas hit by disasters such as hurricanes.  Here’s hoping for a rapid roll-out of the technology.