In today’s New York Times Making Solar Power Portable highlights the rapidly expanding market for solar battery chargers and other micro-scale off-grid energy generating devices, which now boast users as diverse as Silicon Valley CEOs to community health centers in Kenya.

Researchers in Papua New Guinea charge equipment from a portable solar system

These technologies have enormous economic and environmental implications, particularly in the developing world. Emerging markets and less developed nations are experiencing an explosion in the adoption of mobile phones, with some African nations projected to reach 100% market penetration in the next 3 years and rapidly expanding uptake worldwide; we particularly recommend looking at the following spreadsheet to get an idea of the global mobile picture: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tUzZsw5SoG_jXRDl6p8tRCg&single=true&gid=0&output=html

While mobile devices are now ubiquitous worldwide, the same cannot be said of access to reliable sources of electricity. The World Bank estimates some 1.4 billion people do not have access to electricity, which is where off-grid power solutions come in. Private-public cooperation has developed hundreds of new for- and not-for-profit organizations dedicated to developing and distributing new power generation and storage systems for mobile devices, lighting, and other applications, though as we have previously mentioned the distribution of these technologies is marked by a high degree of granularity. In other words, many of these companies and projects are, laudably, focusing  on the areas of greatest need, Africa and Asia. What is needed now is hard data to be able to quantify economic and environmental impacts for end users and the world, respectively, so that implementation of these devices becomes as ubiquitous as the devices they charge, with a lower environmental impact.