Why Aren't Consumer Electronics Generating Our Power Yet?

We've long since reached the point where consumer electronic products run our lives. We rely on gadgets to communicate, to organize our routines, to keep up with the news, to entertain ourselves, to find our way around, and so on. So why don't we use them to generate our power? There's consumer tech that can give you real-time facelift simulations, TVs with higher-res than reality, and drones you can fly with your iPad. So how come there's no slick consumer product to help us power them? Why weren't there a slew of solar-powered products lining the halls at last week's Consumer Electronics Show? And there aren't: Of the 3,200 plus booths at the industry's most important event, there were a mere handful of gadgets designed to make generating energy easier and better.

The answer, previously, was that generating electricity was too unwieldy and expensive. For most of our electrified history, the power generated in the US has come from giant, centralized coal-fired, hydro, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. Recently, the technology behind alternatives like wind and solar has improved drastically, and the cost of materials has plummeted. Yet there's still very little movement on the power-generating consumer electronics front. Gadget makers are intent on building stuff that sucks electricity down, it seems—not so much on creating it.

There are a handful of niche products on the market, sure. But they've so far mostly been awkward, inelegant, and too expensive—they've been tacky solar panel backpacks, costly personal wind turbines, laptop cases covered in photovoltaics. Gadgets like those burst on the scene when the threat of global warming rose to mass attention in the mid-2000s, and a newfangled interest in carbon-free power rose with it.

Over the next few years, governments subsidized the production of wind and solar projects, which helped drive the cost of both down dramatically. Consumer interest, especially in rooftop solar, helped drive it down even further. China became been so aggressive in boosting its solar manufacturing industry that other nations complain it's "dumping" panels to corner the market. All this combined has translated into a spate of new large-scale wind farms and solar plants, and skyrocketing rooftop solar installation—but not much in the way of renewable power consumer electronics.

I had all this in mind as I wandered the floors at CES this year, wading through that fluorescent maze of consumer drones, high def TVs, augmented reality tech, and robots of every shape. Some of the technology on display was already so good that the newly introduced improvements seemed desperate and pointless (curved TVs), while new cutting edge tech like real-time facial modification was startling in its future-forward implications. Yet there were precious few gadgets dedicated to producing clean power, or to make harnessing it easier. That's the bad news. The good news is that the scant offerings that were there were encouraging.

For instance, a company called Eton had a slick solar-powered stereo and iPhone recharging dock, ideal for picnics and beach days. I'd seen it done before, but never this well—it was sort of like Jambox meets solar. Meanwhile, GoalZero was aiming its solar panel travel kits at the outdoor recreational sports market; foldable monocrystal panels that can feed your gadgets on a hike, a climb, or a fishing trip.

More interesting from an innovation standpoint was the li-fi smartphone, showcasing the French company SunPartners' Wysips solar-screen technology. SunPartners makes a film that combines "optical and photovoltaic technologies" and can generate electricity from "a natural or artificial light source." The ultrathin solar film integrates into smartphones' touchscreen; the entire screen becomes a solar panel, essentially. When built directly into the phone, it improves battery life by 15 percent, and allows the phone to remain powered outdoors indefinitely, as long as the sun is shining.

SunPartners' head of business development, Matthieu de Broca, told me that the company was in talks with one of the six largest smartphone companies, China's TCL, to integrate it into a version of their One Touch quad-core phone. Broca also said that the company had attracted $10 million in investment in 2013. Solarphones are likely on the way, in some capacity, and it's an elegant use of the technology to be sure.

The only other consumer renewable that truly stood out was an intruiging contraption called the Lotus Mobile (pictured at top), from a new company called Monarch Power. It's a mid-sized solar array mounted on an aluminum pole, that "blossoms" into a giant photovoltaic lotus flower during the day, and can be folded up into a more compact bud by night. The Lotus Mobile has a capacity of 1.2 kilowatts, which is enough to add a truly healthy amount of power to any home.

The Lotus is designed to be very easy for consumers to set up themselves, and once it is, it automatically tracks the sun's position. According to Monarch's CEO, the Arizona State University professor Joseph Hui, this allows it to be 30 percent more efficient than rooftop panels, and much cheaper—70 percent of the cost of home solar, he says, is from installation. His aray goes for $4,000. Hui hopes to have the Lotus Mobile sold in big box stores soon, saying that the DIY element and "plug and play" nature of the device will prove popular with consumers looking for an easier way to get into solar power.

So, baby steps. The other part of all this is that most consumers simply don't think about power all that much yet—they've been trained not to. I remember seeing an ad for a smartphone a while back where the joke was something to the effect of 'what's your phone powered by, coal?' And the answer is, actually, yeah. Most of them are—even the most futuristic, feature-happy of them all. Maybe our still-growing conscientiousness that our current modes of energy production are largely dirty and outmoded will start to change that perception. Maybe increased concerns about battery life will force more gadget-makers to consider solar.

Or maybe, the materials for experimenting with consumer solar products simply haven't been cheap for long enough yet to see a solar product revolution. Maybe it's just beginning now; Eton's solar stereos are slick, SunPartners' concept is promising, and Monarch Power's Lotus is intruiging. The technology is there, the price point is there—it's high time we saw more clean power-generating products hit the market.