Need quick power? Roll out the Photo Voltaic!

If you have solar screens that could bend and roll, could this be far behind? Access to power in the more remote and off-grid locations around the globe has now been made more accessible by renewable energy company Renovagen. John Hingley and his team at Renovagen have designed a high power PV array that rolls out like a carpet. This flexible and easy-to-transport instant micro grid can bring clean solar energy to places that would not have been possible with conventional methods.  A typical container with a set of Rapid Roll ‘mats’ could supply about 16 KW power, the firm claims. The smallest rapid roll options start at KW, enough to power a small home.

Rapid Roll is a new patented technology for off-grid portable power – a high capacity solar power plant with a rollable tow-out solar field deployable in 2 minutes. The key innovation according to John and his team, which enables this step-change improvement in the power capacity and speed of deployment of commercial-scale solar is the creation of a flexible, rollable solar PV array as a single piece “mat” with built-in structural support and power-transmission cabling embedded throughout. This mat can, therefore, be permanently wired into their innovative spooling mechanism – which means that all the user needs to do is unroll and switch on. No cable connections or system commissioning is required on-site as it is all permanently built into the system.

A modular architecture with many components running in parallel provides resilience if one component fails, the rest will continue to operate. Because of this, the Rapid Roll is a supposed to be a very reliable power system, even in challenging environments and applications and as per the company, will make the most out of the set of conditions it encounters. The firm sees high potential applications with the Military, Mining, Events, disaster relief, smart cities and film production categories.

The Rapid Roll system includes a racked lithium-ion battery bank to deliver high energy density, high performance, safe and cost-effective storage for solar or genset-sourced power. The system uses copper indium gallium selenide solar cells (CIGS) that are bonded with a tensile fabric, the strength of the combined material can cope with being rolled in and out repeatedly.

The idea to develop a large capacity rapid roll product came to John following a trip on which he had a portable folding solar charger, from which he decided to expand and design a utility scale range as a part of his renewable energy company Renovagen. Their first model Rapid Roll “T” has the following configurations, numbers provided by Renovagen. (click here for example product configuration)

click here for the video

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