Solar power is expensive. The creation of the cells cost a pretty penny, and even the smallest, most portable panels lose charging capabilities after only a couple years.
Shawn Frayne and Alex Hornstein were thinking about how to give portable solar charging stations the longevity and price to make them commercially viable and widely available when they came upon a new idea: the Solar Pocket Factory.
"We were visiting microsolar-panel factories in China left and right," Frayne says. "We?d expected to see high-tech modern production, but it turns out microsolar production today is entirely manual. These factory visits led to a mind-blowing realization: Silicon is not the driving cost of microsolar panels. It?s labor and mistakes."
The Solar Pocket Factory, a new Kickstarter project, is their attempt to fix that. After six months of development, the pocket factory can make a new panel every 15 seconds. According to duo?s calculations, that means that just one of the mini factories can power up to 1 million devices a year. And ideally, it won?t create as much waste as current technologies on the market. Frayne and Hornstein hope their small cells will last longer than the usual five-year lifetime most companies give their microsolar panels.
"It?s not often that you stumble into a chance to do something big in clean tech without needing to raise a hundred million dollars," Frayne says. "Reforming the microsolar industry with solar-pocket factories is one of those rare chances to do something big from a couple of garage workshops."
The team?s thin-panel design can fit on the back of a playing card and be adapted to charge just about any small piece of technology, from toys to cellphones. They?ve also started releasing videos detailing how to make your own solar-charging station for cellphones and other battery-powered goods.
Frayne has a history of inventing affordable clean-energy solutions; in 2007 he won a PM Breakthrough Award for his Windbelt?a nonturbine alternative to microwind power. After 2007, that project was shelved, directly leading Frayne to Kickstarter.
"Both Alex [Hornstein] and I had been through the traditional funding route before for other solar and wind startups, and we wanted to just get to work on creating Solar Pocket Factories," Frayne tells PM. "Kickstarter is pretty much the only way to directly tell a bunch of people about a big dream and actually have them want to help make it real."
So far Frayne and Hornstein have raised a little over $13,000 of their $50,000 goal in just a few days. If funded next month, the money will go toward creating the first fully functioning pocket factory.
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