By David Dodge, GreenEnergyFutures.ca
Chris Packard of Firefly Solar was walking home from work one day and saw the Pedal Pub electric-assist bar bikes plugged in and thought, ‘these should be solar-powered?’
The e-bikes are 15-person mobile bars powered by party-going pedallers and an electric assist motor.
“Pedal Pub is a 15-person pedal-powered patio. We take people for two-hour tours around Calgary,” says Marina Costello of Pedal Pub Canada.
“We sample different local brews and have a really good time. So, it’s a mix of some pedalling and some partying and a lot of fun.”
“I used to live in this neighborhood and on my walks home from work I would pass by the pedal pubs and they were all plugged in, so I thought, you know what? It’s got the perfect roof space to put up solar,” says Chris Packard of Firefly Solar also based in Calgary.
“When Chris came to us, I thought that it was a really cool idea and we got going on it fairly quickly,” says Costello.
Solar-powered mobile bar
Each of the Pedal Pub bikes has a 48-volt battery and “it’s sort of like a massive EV pedal assist that you would find on an e-bike,” says Packard.
The cool thing is the electric-assist bikes are charging while they are on the road or when they are parked.
“Whereas with our other bikes, they’re charged at the beginning of the day and then they deplete across all the tours that they’re doing. So, it’s definitely been fantastic and yeah, we love having it,” says Costello.
And it seems customers are taking notice.
“Renewable energy in general is something that I think people are very curious about. And so they always have lots of questions and they think it’s fun to be on that special bike that we have that is charged by the sun,” says Costello.
The Merlin modules are just millimeters thick and yet have a capacity of 425 watts and efficiency rates just over 20 percent.
This got me wondering if I could power my own e-bike with these flexible modules.
Costello laughed and suggested I’d need a rather large umbrella with solar on it, something she says “might be a little janky.”
True enough, Merlin has collapsible solar that is quite flexible, but it’s hard to imagine carrying enough to power my own e-bike on a backpack.
More solar to come
Costello is impressed enough with the performance that she says, “We’re interested in expanding across the rest of the fleet.”
And Packard says he’s interested in using the fleets in a vehicle-to-grid format to feed electricity into the grid when the bikes are idle.
Thin-film solar has been around for a long time, but it seems these newer models are quite robust. Packard has installed them on recreational vehicles, but he says there are many other applications that are possible, such as weird roof shapes or on fleets of trucks.
What started as a simple idea may lead to other applications beyond the Pedal Pub fleet.
Like all good conversations on a pub crawl, this one ended with a toast of some fine Alberta craft beers.
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