2nd Year Project

Money Where My Mouth Is

Logan Patterson, lpatterson.015@gmail.com, Political Science/Economics

Description

My project aims were to make efforts toward supporting a green energy initiative, which is something that I support from a political standpoint. Many people are pro-green energy, but it’s hard to find ways to live a lifestyle that reflects that, especially as a college student. To that end, I have been using only a solar cell to charge my cell phone, every weekend for the last 3 months.

Process

My dad works as a commercial electrician and he gave me this solar cell to use as a battery back-up. I decided to try to use this solar cell as the only means of powering one of the most important devices in my life. Anytime I wasn’t charging my phone, I would leave this solar cell in an open window and allow it to fully charge, then use that to recharge my phone’s battery

Results

The Results were mixed. On some days it was incredibly cloudy, and I will admit that I needed to cheat once or twice so as to actually have battery in my phone, but overall I was able to appreciate the energy usage more, and I was able to maintain my phone by limiting how often or how long I would use my phone.

Reflection

I think that I took a lot away from this project. For starters, it’s much more clear to me now that clean energy is possible, even in my day to day life. With increased efficiency and storage for the energy I used, it would be possible to use my phone practically year round with this sort of setup. It also gave me a sense of energy conservation, as on the weekend I was limiting my phone use by an incredible amount.

Pictures/Visuals

This is a photo of the solar cell in the window of my room. The window had to be open because the windows themselves are designed to block sunlight as energy efficiency measure.