These boots are made for talking...

Just in time for this year's Glastonbury, mobile phone giant Orange, which for the past 12 years has been the official Festival Communications partner, in conjunction with renewable energy firm GotWind has announced its new eco-invention: phone charging wellies.  

The Orange Power Wellies use a power generating sole, that charges as you stomp around the site, using heat produced from your feet.  If they could also harness power from the smell from one’s feet after 6 days of festival frivolities they’d be onto a sure fire winner, but I guess that’s another story.

Nevertheless, apparently 12 hours of stomping around the site will generate enough juice to power a mobile phone for an hour, and probably much more if you spend much time in the Dance Village.

According to the designers you plug your phone into the power output at the top of the welly after a full day’s energy collection and use the energy to charge your phone. The power is collected via a process known as the ‘Seebeck’ effect (named after inventor Thomas Johann Seebeck who discovered the thermoelectric effect in 1921). Inside the power generating sole there are thermoelectric modules forming thermocouples. These thermocouples are connected electrically forming an array of multiple thermocouples (thermopile) which are 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. 

Alas these boots are still at the prototype stage and won’t be commercially available at the festival, but the Orange Chill ‘n’ Charge tent will be onsite all weekend for you to charge your phone for free with more charging points than ever before, and not just that, this year it will have surprise guests as well as the chance to win side of stage tickets each day.

Photo by Geoftheref