Solar panel portable or portable solar panels are becoming very popular. Solar-powered calculators have been around for years. Solar car chargers that plug into your cigarette lighter are now a popular piece of safety equipment for many a traveler. Solar iPod chargers are out there and solar cell phones are somewhere around the technological bend. Now a notebook-sized solar panel portable can charge your notebook computer. Portable solar technology may offer a solution for you.

Not many years ago, portable solar power was only practical for low-power uses. For higher-power uses, the portable solar panel wasn’t so portable anymore. For example, you could easily hike with a solar power portable for charging your cell phone, but taking a laptop and the solar panel to charge it would be ridiculous. Now there is solar technology built right into backpacks that can recharge your GPS unit on the cloudiest of days. On the large end of portable, many RVs now run all of their electrical from solar panels on their roof.

Portable solar panels have recently become even more portable due to new “thin-film” technology that allows the panel to be so flexible that it can be rolled to a diameter of two inches and slid in a tube for travel or storage. Simply unroll the panel and lay it on the ground. After you plug it into the converter, you are generating solar power! This sounds great for camping, boating, hiking, and almost every other outdoor activity. But just because it’s called portable solar panel doesn’t mean you can’t use it at home.

At home, I like to sit out on the patio in good weather and work on my laptop. When the battery starts dying, I have had to go back inside to work or drag an extension cord behind me. With the new portable panel technology, I could power my laptop right next to me. Portable stereos that eat batteries at an alarming rate can now just sit beside a flexible solar panel all day and pump out tunes. Think of ways you use, or would like to use, power outside, both at home and away.

Solar panel portables of all kinds are available for both specific (car charger) and general (plug-in-something) applications. They offer us energy on demand for a little money upfront. Consider them a micro-generator that is whisper quiet. Soon, solar energy will – quite literally – be in your pocket.