He makes sun's power portable

CEDAR GROVE -- Chuck Cooper has a knack for turning environmental problems into green enterprises that benefit people in need.

He did it two decades ago with scrap plastic, grinding industrial waste into raw material for manufacturers. More recently, he expanded the concept to create recycling jobs for people with disabilities.

"That's part of Chuck's life vision and business vision, to extend a helping hand to individuals who are less fortunate," said Ralph Bryson, chief executive of CarVaGa Industries, a vocational rehabilitation center established in Danville, Va. Established in 2004, the center provides workers for the plastics processor PreServe Resources.

"We collaborated to get this going. We were lucky to find someone who had that mission in life," Bryson said of Cooper. "He has that vision of what might be."

Cooper, 51, a former Atlanta mortgage banker, has carved out a career as an Orange County environmental entrepreneur. He moved to the Triangle in 1990 so his children could enroll in a Waldorf alternative school in Chapel Hill.

Cooper's latest idea could help people and benefit the planet. He has developed a prototype trailer equipped with 12 solar panels that can deliver power to places that lack electricity or have been knocked off the grid by a natural disaster. To market the invention, he and his son, Noah Cooper-Harris, have founded a company, Solus International.

The solar panels produce about 2,400 watts of electricity. That's enough to power a small water filtration system, a satellite phone, and a mini medical clinic with a refrigerator to hold medicines. By comparison, a backup generator used in a home may produce 3,000 to 6,000 watts. But the generator needs fossil fuels, spews pollution, and creates unrelenting noise.

Right now, the trailer, nicknamed the "PV Cruiser," short for photovoltaic cruiser, is quietly using sun energy to power appliances in Cooper's farmhouse in rural Orange County. It has a bank of rechargeable batteries that store electricity for use when the sun isn't shining. It's also been deployed to power lights and amplifiers at outdoor Earth Day events and music festivals.

Cooper envisions the trailer performing a direct humanitarian role, delivering flexible alternative energy to people living in remote places or victims of disaster.

"It would almost be like disaster relief in a box," said Oriana Galardi-Este, a policy analyst with Solus International.

Access to dependable energy and clean water is critical to improving people's lives and breaking the cycles of poverty and disease, he says. A portable unit doesn't require high fixed costs of installing permanent solar panels or waiting for power lines to reach remote areas.

"The impulse was to use solar in places that didn't have infrastructure," Cooper said. "You're able to offer services to folks that don't have them."

Cooper wants to offer the trailer free to a humanitarian organization to field test it for a year.

"This is not a get-rich scheme," said Cooper. "We're willing to provide it free for a period of time so we can get out there and see if this is viable. We want to see what does work and what doesn't work and build on that."

The Solar Electric Light Fund, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that works to deliver solar power and wireless communications to rural villages in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, is considering deploying the trailer to Haiti.

Bob Freling executive director of the nonprofit, said the organization is working with Partners in Health, an international nonprofit organization, to electrify medical clinics in Haiti using solar power.