Solar device looks to add outlets to remote spots

Bloomberg Businessweek 

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — South Dakota entrepreneur Brian Gramm was tailgating outside a college football game one sunny day when he wondered why he couldn’t use that energy to plug in a radio.

The first-world inconvenience led him to develop the Forty2, an all-in-one “utility in a box” that Gramm now thinks could change millions of third-world lives.

The device, which looks like a quadruple-sized laptop computer, could generate and store enough solar power in a remote African village to run a dorm refrigerator filled with medicine, a couple of fans and a dozen LED lights, said Gramm, founder and chief executive of Peppermint Energy.