For the last three years I have volunteered at the Shambhala In Your Heart culture and art festival which is held in our village each February. It was originally started by some Japanese hippies twenty years ago and is now quite established and has many adherents from all over the world. The festival lasts for 10 days and nowadays has a total attendance of 7,000 people, with up to 3,000 people camping on site on any given day. So it is quite an logistical task to provide enough water, shade, sanitation and electricity for all these folks. Most of the attendees are young adults who need to be digitally connected at all times and so providing enough charging points has been an issue in the past. I decided to kill two birds with one stone by offering to install a solar system dedicated to phone charging, which would also align the festival more with their philosophy of peace, love, beauty and care for the environment.
Looking around for suitable equipment, I came across a new development which is the All in One inverter and battery. These units have been on the market for some time, but generally in small sizes, suitable for camping or short duration household emergencies. Now they are making large units capable of powering a whole house, small village or art festival. In the early days of solar, all the components of a system, (Inverter, charge controller and battery), were separate pieces that had to be integrated on site by a solar technician. The All in One, as the name suggests, does away with all that and makes the system essentially, "plug and play". Solar panels are still external amd need to be correctly specified and installed, but this is a easy task.
I ordered the equipment directly from China and began testing it prior to the festival. Just before the beginning of the festival, some volunteers helped me set the system up as part of the Trash and Recycling Station, right in the middle of the festival site. For the next 10 days the system performed flawlessly, charging hundrerds and hundreds of phones, power banks and video cameras etc. In the morning, the battery would be almost completely discharged, but solar charging would recommence around 8am and the battery would be full again before noon. All in all, the system was a great success and many festival goers got to see that solar really does work. Solar is relatively new in Asia and many people are still unconvinced of its reliability and cost effectiveness.
I will continue to provide phone charging power at future festivals or any other public event where portable solar makes sense. But I have a bigger goal also: emergency community power in the event of a natural disaster. Chiang Dao is at the end of the utility line and we can be cut off because of flooding or earthquake.I am proposing to offer my portable All in One system to the local authorities for use in case of such emergencies. I forsee a situation where during a heatwave the All in One could power an air conditioner in a school or hospital and relieve the heat stress among young and old alike.
I think that there could be a bright future for equipment like the All in One in remote villages, but to work well it would need to be suported by an extensive dealer network that could offer loaner units while the original ones were in for service and repair.
Who knows? It may happen. The world is changing at breakneck speed and solar is playing a big part.
Many thanks for your interest and support,
Best wishes,
Bruce
