Give Yourself A Limitless Supply Of Free Solar Energy

If you want a portable generator to power your house in a power outage, or an off-grid campsite, or jobsite, you can use two types of fuel. One requires digging deep into the earth to retrieve non-renewable fossil fuels that are messy, smelly, and toxic. Or you can use beautiful, warm, life-giving, never-ending sunlight.

When you step outside on a sunny day and feel that warmth on your face, you're feeling the sun's power. Solar cells turn photons from the sun into electrons that can power your appliances, tools, and digital devices.

According to MIT physics professor Washington Taylor, solar energy amounting to 173 petawatts (that's thousands of trillions of watts) hits the Earth constantly. Yep, more than 173 thousand trillion watts of power hit the planet in the time it took you to read this sentence. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use, says Taylor. 

And it's all free. There is no price-per-gallon for solar energy and that price never goes up.

There is one issue when it comes to relying solely on solar power. When the sun's not out, you're not harvesting the sun's rays. But if you combine efficient solar panels with strong batteries, you'll be covered 24/7. During the day, the sun pumps power into your batteries, and then you use all that stored power from the batteries during times when the sun is warming faces on the other side of the planet.

Also: You can Fill the Gaps on Power and Have a Backup for Emergencies with the Growatt Infinity 1500 Portable Power Station

That whole virtuous cycle is made possible with a portable power station and solar panels made by Growatt, one of the world's leading suppliers of energy inverters. In an earlier article, we spotlighted the storage and delivery capabilities of the Growatt Infinity 1500 Portable Power Station. This time, we're going to dive deeper into how the sun charges the generator.

Make your own wall and USB power… from the sun

Sure, you can plug the Infinity 1500 into the wall and charge it from the electrical grid. But what if you're out camping in the woods, or otherwise off grid? Here's an interesting modern take on the traditional camping experience. 

Back in the day, when you went camping, you'd cook your food over a wood fire. That was part of the whole camping experience. But with increased drought and a surge in wildfires, many off-grid areas are under a strict burn ban. For folks who want to enjoy the pleasures of camping (and eating hot food), a solar generator is a much safer alternative to a campfire.

Just bring the Infinity 1500, a set of solar panels, and a hot plate. You and your friends can enjoy all the pleasures of cooking in the field, without any chance of cinders or sparks getting loose and causing a devastating fire. It's convenient, practical, responsible… and fun.

The power of Growatt technology

Growatt has leveraged its experience as a leader in the design and production of solar energy inverters to design the solar generator system. When protons from the sun hit silicon-based solar cells, electrons are knocked loose from their bonds, creating both negatively and positively charged particles, which create a flow of electrons, producing electricity. A whole series of these electricity-producing solar cells are mounted together, into solar panels. It's these panels that you deploy to catch the power from the sun.

The panels produce electricity, but that power isn't yet usable by consumer-level electrical devices. To make the transition from solar panel to solar generator, a circuit called an MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking) Charge Controller negotiates the energy transfer interface between the solar cells and the batteries, providing 800W in power into the generator on clear, sunny days.

This is a technology where Growatt has already been an industry leader with over a decade of experience, which is shown in the efficiency of the MPPT,  which reaches 99% (or almost no energy loss during conversion). This is important, because not all days are sunny. The Infinity 1500's solar charger is highly efficient, so even on a cloud day, nearly all the energy that makes it into the solar cells is transferred into the solar generator's batteries.

So, now you've carried the panels out in their pouch, unfolded them, opened up their stands so they're facing the sun, and plugged them into the solar charger. How long does it take to fully charge the Infinity 1500 power station? Here's where Growatt's experience with solar inverters shines. It takes less than 2.5 hours to fully charge the power station.

That's fast enough that you don't have to worry about the sun moving in the sky before the charging is done. With the Growatt solar charger, just point the panels at the sun, grab a leisurely lunch, and it will be full and ready to use.

All it takes is access to a sunny sky to charge up the generator, and the batteries inside the Infinity 1500 will get you through the night, until the sun comes back up tomorrow. Day in, day out, you can have electrical power – free to generate, because the sun is there for us all.

It's here that it might be worth taking a minute to fully appreciate what this means. For nearly all of us, for all our lives, electrical power required us to be tethered in some way to the producing source. We had to plug devices into the wall, where energy came to us via electrical utility companies. We had to purchase batteries from retailers, which were usable until depleted. Or we had to buy gasoline to fill generators, generating noise and pollution as they generated power.

But now, you can carry Growatt's solar cells in a case, and the Infinity 1500 power station by its handles. You can keep it in the trunk of your car. You don't need wall power. You don't need gasoline. You don't need anything except the solar panel and the generator box, and you can create your own electrical power. For more information, visit Growatt's Infinity 1500 resource page.