Innovative Product Award Generator Category Winner PowrBank Solar Trailer

Innovative Product Award Generator Category Winner PowrBank Solar Trailer

Category: Generators/Welders

Manufacturer: Manufactured for Powr2 by Steelpoint Manufacturing

Product Name: PowrBank Solar Trailer

Key Innovation: A rental-ready, rugged, folding solar trailer, allowing fast deployment of emission free energy on construction sites, events and remote work sites.

Manufacturer’s description: The PowrBank Solar Trailer is comprised of 12 X 350 Wp solar panels on a fold-out frame mounted on a heavy duty, twin axle, rental ready trailer. Available with or without an integrated PowrBank Renewable Power System to store energy in safe-tech lithium-ion batteries.

Add a diesel generator for cloudy days or redundancy. Single or 3 phase power output.

240v/208v 60kWH of energy storage

Two major challenges in the construction, oilfield, emergency response or events industries are 1 – Space and 2 – Ease of deployment. By incorporating the PowrBank Renewable Power System and solar panels on a sliding rack, space is minimized, and the array can be deployed in minutes.

Applications: Job sites – office trailer guard shacks.

Oilfields and pipelines – remote generators.

Events – EV charging and anywhere a small generator is used.

Emergency response – temporary housing.

RER interviews Tim Doling, vice president of sales:

The product, certainly unique to the rental industry, was born out of an interest on the part of customers to become more green and more sustainable, looking for ways to use renewable energy on sites.

“The biggest problem with solar is that it takes up a lot of space and is difficult to deploy,” Doling says. “You have lots of solar panels, but how to turn that into a rental asset that you can take out to the field, use it onsite and then easily pack in back up again and bring it back to the yard and then re-deploy it to another site. It’s very costly to do that. So, we thought the best way would be to build this trailer that has multiple panels and have it on this sliding mechanism that enables it to double up on the capacity by having it all slide into a compact cassette and then you open it out once you get to your location.”

Doling explains how the unit functions. “The DC power comes in through the solar panels, it goes into our power bank unit and then gets stored in the lithium power banks and then gets released out whenever the customer has a need for power,” he says. “Solar can fade in and out quite quickly if clouds go across or something like that. You don’t want to be left in a situation where the batteries are completely depleted so to top off the batteries as needed you have a diesel generator there for redundancy.”

The unit is designed to function on its own but can be equipped with remote monitoring. “We can log into our systems and see how much solar is being generated, how much load is there, is the battery being depleted in accordance with what solar is being produced. We can see that and set alerts so we can decide when to start the generator.”

The solar power trailer is likely to be used to power events when events return and construction jobsite trailers and office cabins, at industrial facilities and more. It recently was used where a multiple-acre solar farm was being constructed and a green power source was required. With increasing interest in green and sustainable power, the solar power trailer is likely a good rental item for a more environmentally conscious age.