Orange Solar Concept Tent: Glastonbury's Self-Powered Festival Tent

The Orange Solar Concept Tent was a festival tent that powered itself. Built around "solar threads" woven into its fabric, it promised to charge your phone overnight, warm the groundsheet on a cold night and glow on command so you could find it in a field of thousands. Mobile network Orange and the design consultancy Kaleidoscope unveiled it in June 2009 for the Glastonbury Festival.

Orange, Kaleidoscope and Glastonbury 2009

Orange designed the tent to mark its eleventh year at Glastonbury, working with Kaleidoscope, an American product design consultancy. It was presented strictly as a concept, a way of imagining what a connected campsite could look like, and it never went on sale as a product.

The setting explains the brief. Glastonbury takes place on Worthy Farm, between the villages of Pilton and Pylle in Somerset, about six miles east of the town of Glastonbury. The 2009 festival ran in late June, sold all 137,500 tickets and had Blur, Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young as Pyramid Stage headliners. For a few days, a farm turns into a tent city where finding your own pitch at night and keeping a phone charged are real problems.

How the solar tent was meant to work

Instead of rigid panels, the concept used photovoltaic threads woven into the fabric of a curved outer shell. The energy travelled through wires inside the flexible tent poles to a central hub. The main features were:

• Adjustable solar shell: three directional glides that could be moved during the day to keep the panels facing the sun.
• Control hub: a wireless hub that showed energy generated, stored and used on a flexible touch-screen LCD panel, and also provided a wireless internet signal.
• Wireless charging: a pouch that charged a phone overnight by magnetic induction, with no cables.
• Heated groundsheet: an under-floor heating element that switched on automatically when the temperature inside dropped below a set level.
• Glo-cation: campers could text the tent, or use an active RFID tag, to make it light up so they could spot it from a distance.

Solar power for camping today

The tent's ideas have since spread separately. Wireless charging is standard on many phones, and campers carry folding solar panels and power banks instead of a tent with built-in cells. The basic energy budget is the same as in 2009: what you can harvest depends on panel area, sun angle and hours of daylight, and what you can use after dark depends on how much you can store.

For winter and mountain camping, keep batteries inside your sleeping bag on cold nights, since low temperatures cut their capacity. Our guides to a snowy hot-tent overnight and to a free mountain bivouac show simpler ways to stay warm outdoors, and Solar Roadways is another bold solar concept from the same era.

Related reading

• Solar Roadways: Separating a Paving Proposal from Proven Performance
• Wawhiker’s Snowy Overnight: A Hot Shelter, Ground Insulation and Camp Routine
• Amok Draumr’s Early Hammock Design: Sitting and Sleeping Outdoors
• Tentsile’s Suspended Shelter: A Campsite Above the Ground
• Daniel Barreto’s digital woodland houses

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