“Here’s an analogy,” he said, likening a battery to a water storage tank. “You have a little water pump pumping a small, constant stream of water in a tank. Without that tank, you couldn’t have a shower.”
The occasional intermittence of these devices’ energy supply can be a drawback. But for some users, they are literally lifesavers.
“We have lions and elephants nearby here,” said Martin Graber, a doctor and international development consultant who works in the Narok district of southwest Kenya.
Graber uses a solar-powered lantern in the clinics he helped to develop.
“We have a new clinic that has no electricity at present,” he said recently. “There was a young man who came in who had a finger almost entirely amputated. We used the light from the lantern to take care of his finger.”
Graber said he also used the lanterns when he goes to the outhouse at night.
“I want to make sure there are no animals,” he said.
Smith, who has become chief executive of Blue Legacy International, an environmental nonprofit group that develops Web films to “focus attention on water issues around the world,” used his portable charger in July to power his Twitter posts when he and a colleague became stranded in the middle of Tonle Sap lake in Cambodia, one of the world’s largest bodies of fresh water.
Because Smith had a solar charger, “we were able to get someone to send us another boat,” he said. “And we were able to save a day of filming.”
Taking these devices on airplanes poses no difficulties, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration, Lara Uselding, said in an e-mail message.
The only exceptions are larger storage batteries that contain “liquid coolant, lubricants, etc,” she said.
They fall under the hazardous materials designation and are not allowed on planes. (Those batteries should be shipped as hazardous materials.)
“I’ve never had any trouble going through airport security with these chargers,” said Smith, adding that security personnel were often intrigued by the devices.
“When you find these devices that are innovative and socially responsible,” he said, “it’s fantastic.”
Business travelers who work in remote locations “have this very real necessity that’s solved by these renewable devices, and it enables us to practice what we preach.”
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