If you ever wanted to know more about the infrastructure that provides your favorite dark ambient music, here is the right place.

I used to have a ~120W Desktop PC for sending the stream to viastreaming.com, where it is multiplied x 60. In 2010 I decided to save some energy costs and moved to a used CoreDuo notebook (HP nc2400) that's only consuming ~15W. Just for fun, I decided to boost the notebook by solar energy whenever possible. It's not that much, maybe 10-20% of the grid electricity (which comes from Greenpace Energy, btw.) can be substituted.

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To inject solar electricity on the DC side of the notebook's power supply I had to build a little circuit:

This prohibits the panel from frying the notebook, if the sun is burning and there is more power produced by the panel than is used by the notebook. For additional safety, I also have a 48V-relay that would cut off the panel, if the voltage climbs higher than 20V. But this is probably not necessary, if the transistor can bear the current (it has a processor cooler attached).

I belive with panel prices going down, this kind of power production could become more feasable in the near future. Solar-boosting makes sense for devices that are in use 24/7. It's a good way to anticipate the restructuring of global power production a bit and to fight the inability of humankind to move on from carbon-based energy production with an individual approach.

Anyway, I have little hope that the worst effects of climate change (and along with it huge human suffering) will be avoided. But at least I did something...

Update 2017: Balcony power plants with a few hundred watts became a trend these days, though grid providers are slow officially allowing to plug it in in Germany. Austria is much faster here. Btw.: My two 35W amorpous silicon thin layer modules have deceased in terms of voltage over the years and I had to boost them using a 10V crystalline Si module. But they still serve well as canopy, sheltering the balcony from rain.



The balcony modules on the west side together with the three 10V crystalline Si modules decorating an east side window create a power curve like this on a rather sunny day:



The top of the image marks 20W, left and right edges mark 12pm. Whenever the panel power exceeds 10W, the server does computations for SETI@home to burn excess energy.

Update 2020: The MacMini that runs the radio in a VirtualBox only has an AC power connector. So I bought an inexpensive micro converter that transforms the DC power from the panels into AC:



I learned that there is actually a name for this kind of activity: it's called solarpunk.