Solarkiosk to bring green energy to remote communities

The cabin features photovoltaic panels across its roof to generate sustainable energy in areas outside of conventional power cabling and infrastructures. Gemalto's Cinterion modules deliver rugged M2M connectivity powering a mobile router, provided by INSYS icom, which enables condition monitoring of the Solarkiosk's photovoltaic panels and tracks energy production and consumption through a web interface.

Quick and easy to deploy, the Solarkiosk supports simple plug-in access for appliances, devices and a broad range of systems. Each kiosk generates enough electricity to operate the cellular router and recharge 220 cellphones a day - up to 80 at the same time. The M2M solution monitors and manages the solar panels on a 24/7 basis, tracking energy input and output, providing a reliable system for power delivery to end-users, and automatically reporting potential problems.

The Solarkiosk produces sustainable electricity for a variety of services, including refrigerated storage for medicines as well as for consumer products. By delivering these benefits to remote communities, Solarkiosks are expected to transform the lives of millions of people who live in the rural areas of developing countries. Projects are already operating in Ethiopia, Botswana and Kenya, supplying both power and access to information, in particular for education and creating a social hub for local communities.

Extreme environments

"One of the biggest challenges for M2M communication is to function properly in extreme environments, such as the intense heat of an African desert or the tremendous moisture of a South American rainforest," said Michael Gartz, director of Sales and Marketing for INSYS icom. "INSYS icom and Gemalto heavy-duty technologies are ideally suited for those areas that are not connected to an electricity grid, such as rural and remote areas in developing countries and districts affected by disasters. An estimated 1.5 billion people worldwide live in such regions, with 600 million in Africa alone and Solarkiosk will be there to serve them."

"In many parts of the world, traditional power infrastructures are difficult to set up and quickly become expensive to maintain," added Thomas Steffen, M2M Regional Manager of Gemalto. "With Solarkiosk, we aspire to play a social role in meeting such machine-for-human challenges, whatever the geographical constraints."