Solar-powered trees are planted in Israel to charge phones, cool water, and offer Wi-Fi

By Jason Hahn October 26, 2014

eTree solar tree Israel — Image used with permission by copyright holder

All trees convert sunlight into chemical energy, but now there are trees that convert sunlight into power to charge devices, cool water, offer free Wi-Fi and more for the benefit of their surrounding communities. Thanks to an imaginative idea from an Israeli company called Sologic, solar-powered trees are taking root to raise environmental awareness while providing green energy.

The eTree comprises a metal trunk that branches out to support solar panels instead of leaves. The structure, which looks like a pixelated tree in an 8-bit video game, uses the energy captured by the solar panels to provide USB charging outlets for smartphones and tablets, free Wi-Fi, a water trough for pets, a drinking-water fountain for humans, nighttime lighting and informational LCD screens.

“We’re used to seeing big companies working on large-scale systems,” says Michael Lasry, founder of Sologic. “Now we see solar energy becoming accessible to each one of us on the street.”

The first eTrees were unveiled Thursday at the HaNadiv Gardens near Zikhron Ya’akov in Israel. Sologic has plans to sell more of these solar-powered trees in China and France.

One Acacia model eTree (the kind planted in Israel) costs about $100,000. A seven-panel version can generate up to 1.4 kilowatts, which is enough to run 35 laptops.

The big price tag means the eTree probably won’t replace traditional rooftop solar panels, but it has a chance at becoming a popular eye-pleasing fixture in parks across the globe, according to Eli Barnea, an investor in Israel’s largest private power company.

Sologic foresees future eTrees utilizing cameras along with touchscreen displays to enable someone standing beneath one solar-powered tree to say hello to someone else standing beneath another eTree planted anywhere in the world.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Contributor

Jason Hahn is a part-time freelance writer based in New Jersey. He earned his master's degree in journalism at Northwestern…

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Entertainment

AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying

Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."