Solar phone charging station for migrants

(Baonghean.vn) - A group of students from the University of Edinburgh have designed a model of a solar-powered phone charging station.

Children at Kara Tepe refugee camp stand around a solar charger on the Greek island of Lesbos on June 14.

For refugees and migrants stranded in Greece, a smartphone also means a lifeline – as long as its battery lasts.

However, using a phone is extremely difficult in each crowded refugee camp full of people. Finding a phone charging outlet is also not easy to find in coffee shops near refugee camps because there, children and the elderly are always the priority subjects to call home.

So a group of students from the University of Edinburgh hope to change that, by designing a mobile phone charging station that runs solely on sunlight - a readily available energy source in Greece.

They installed two solar phone charging stations in each refugee camp. Each station allows 12 plugs to be plugged in an hour, and thus each station can provide free electricity to 240 people a day.

This unique idea came from 20-year-old student Alexandros Angelopoulos during a summer trip to the island of Samos.

This student said that witnessing hundreds of people fleeing war and poverty stuck here after a long journey at sea, he came up with this idea.

“When they arrived here, they had to use their phones to Google Maps to plan their next trip to Northern Europe. However, their phones ran out of battery and they had to use my phone to call their families or access the internet because it was very difficult for them to find a public socket,” Alexandros said.

“We just want to make a positive contribution to the local community through renewable energy,” said project co-founder Samuel Kellerhals, 21.

The first two stations of the Elpis project – which means “hope” in Greek – were designed and built with the help of Greek solar technology company Entec.

The project's implementers said that installing these phone charging stations was not easy because all the procedures in Greece were quite complicated. However, all the installation work has been completed.

Three more solar charging stations have now been built, funded through an online crowdfunding campaign. “We hope to see more and more of these charging stations around the refugee camps in Greece,” said Samuel Kellerhals.

Dawn

(According to Reuters)