We thought that you would find this a particularly interesting story – a solar power structure called the Strawberry Tree. It includes a number of solar panels that provide power to 16 ports to enable people to re-charge the likes of their mobile phones and laptops for free.
The structure has won a number of awards including the European Union’s Sustainable Energy Week award for being an excellent environmental scheme.
It was created by Milos Milisavlievic who is known to have created the first solar charger that was available for public use. He later set up the Strawberry Energy NGO and the Strawberry Energy team is now made up of nine students from the University of Belgrade.
It was back in 2010 that the first Strawberry Tree was built in Belgrade’s Obrenovac municipality. Within forty days, there had been 10,000 charges carried out and there are now eight trees in existence.
The trees are proving very popular with almost 1,000 people using them each day during winter and many more utilising them in the summer period. The solar panels provide enough energy from the sun to power up the likes of MP3 players, mobile phones, iPads, digital cameras and iPods.
The Strawberry Trees have batteries in them so that any spare energy can be stored so that they can be used during darkness and on days when there are a lot of clouds in the sky. Each tree has a wooden bench so that people can relax whilst their iPhone 4’s are charging that takes under 15 minutes. The trees even provide free Wi-Fi Internet usage.
It will be interesting to monitor if we see the growth of many more Strawberry Trees around the world. There would certainly appear to be a huge call for them as there are no doubt many people’s mobile phones that run out of battery charge during the day.
