Cell charging gumboots

These aren’t quite your grandparent’s old wellies:

Mobile operator Orange and unfortunately named GotWind have teamed up to create a pair of cell phone charging and rather funky wellington boots for the UK’s Glastonbury music festival.
The boots create green kinetic electricity simply by having the wearer stomp around in the mud with them all day – storing up power in a battery pack wearers can then use to charge their phones.
As any festival goer knows, keeping your phone and other electronic devices topped up with power while sleeping in a tent is no easy feat but it looks like Orange has ‘stepped’ in with this rather novel solution to the age old problem.
Dubbed the Orange Power Wellies, these Wellington boots (or Gumboots as they are sometimes referred to in the US) are a far cry from the pair you already probably have stashed in a closet or garage. In fact, these are probably the most high tech wellington boots this side of some classified NASA program.
For the more technically minded, Orange’s press release explained that “the power collected in the ‘power generating sole’ is collected via a process known as the ‘Seebeck’ effect. Inside the power generating sole there are thermoelectric modules constructed of pairs of p-type and n-type semiconductor materials forming a thermocouple.
“These thermocouples are connected electrically forming an array of multiple thermocouples (thermopile). They are then sandwiched between two thin ceramic wafers. When the heat from the foot is applied on the top side of the ceramic wafer and cold is applied on the opposite side, from the cold of the ground, electricity is generated.”
It’s not the first time Orange has teamed up with GotWind on a green energy project for Glastonbury. Previous devices include the Recharge Pod powered by wind and solar energy, Dance Charger which drew upon kinetic energy created by dancing and the Orange Power Pump which uses the energy created from a traditional foot pump converted it into electricity.
Though the tech is very impressive it’s not for the impatient among us: 12 hours of wearing the boots translates into just one hours’ worth of juice for your mobile phone. Still, better than a muddy kick in the pants, eh?