this is life in austin & aspen

Our beloved hometown festival, South by Southwest, is apparently sponsoring this crazy new solar-technology pump that charges electric scooters at the Roskilde Festival. Confused yet?

Here are the players:

SXSW – Duh. Our giant interactive/film/music festival.

Roskilde Festival – Held just outside of Copenhagen, Denmark (July 2 – 5, 2009), the annual Roskilde Festival is one of the largest music festivals in Europe. Created in 1971 by two high school students, it was adopted by the Roskilde Foundation in 1972 as a non-profit organization for the development and support of music, culture and humanism. Over four days and nights of music, the 2009 event will feature over 180 bands on six stages. Headlining artists include: Coldplay, Oasis, Nine Inch Nails, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, The Mars Volta, Social Distortion, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Glasvegas, M. Ward, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Royksopp, Lily Allen and Trentemøller among many, many more.

Sol Design Lab – Based in Austin, Texas, projects include solar charging stations, sustainable design for educational and cultural centers in Northeastern Brazil, solar powered bike trailers for arts festivals, Green Map and carbon footprint work, and large-scale outdoor murals. Sol Design Lab’s mission is to create interactive and inspiring solutions for urban sustainability, public art, and design.

SolarPump™ - created in February 2009 by Beth Ferguson, an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, the intention is to help people re-imagine the future of transportation by showing solar powered mobility in action. Using the reclaimed body of a 1950s gas station pump retrofitted with solar panels, she installed an innovative system to harness solar energy to charge electric scooters, laptops, cell phones, cameras, etc. (any item that uses a standard electric plug). In consultation with SXSW staff, Ferguson redesigned and modified the Pump to be truly portable, temporary, and suitable for outdoor events.

OK, so the story: SXSW partners with Roskilde to try out the Sol Design Lab SolarPump. Not so hard now, right?

At Roskilde, electric scooters that members of the media can use to travel back and forth from the Media Village (in the center of the festival grounds) to the Press Center about a mile away (where the media can use the facilities to file stories) will be powered by the SolarPump, which has mechanims to measure time remaining, battery charged, and so on.

Basically, they’re testing it out, and generating buzz because festivalgoers are going to be curious as to what the heck an iconic ’50s gas pump is doing in the middle of their festival. Eve McArthur, Operations Director at SXSW, said, “We were attracted to the SolarPump™ because it had humor and was a visual pun, and even in the planning stages, the project proved itself to be a conversation starter, sparking discussion about clean energy and possibilities for artistic expression within the medium.”

I can only imagine downtown Austin next March buzzing around with zillions of electric scooters stopping to fuel up at SolarPumps … laced with iPhone charging stations, of course.