We thought laptop makers had all of their concept PCs out of the way for a while after CES 2025, but Lenovo held a bunch of surprises in store for Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. In addition to the mega-2-in-1 ThinkBook Flip AI and some nifty snap-on Magic Bay second-screen prototypes, the company showed off its Yoga Solar PC Concept, which I had a chance to check out firsthand before its announcement, at a demo in New York City.
This experimental laptop may be precisely what you expect from the name: a solar-powered PC. A grid of small solar panels that can turn light into battery life populates the screen lid, and while it won’t be coming to market anytime soon, I still enjoyed seeing it function firsthand. The video above demonstrates how it works, with more details below.
A Laptop That Harnesses the Sun (or Your Office Lamp)
In addition to the obvious potential convenience for field workers and laptop users far off the grid, Lenovo developed the Yoga Solar PC Concept with an eye toward sustainability and environmental awareness. Drawing in renewable solar energy rather than relying on electricity is more green on paper, though it can be difficult to implement solar charging in a way that works efficiently and effectively at small scale. Let’s see how the laptop’s physical design accomplishes this.
(Credit: Weston Almond)
The lid is covered by 84 small solar cells, and beyond the fact that that’s unique for a laptop, full stop, the type of panels that Lenovo deployed here is interesting. Lenovo deployed Back Contact Cell (BCC) technology to solve for both energy conversion and fitting as many panels as possible onto a laptop lid.
What does that mean? We’re used to seeing solar panels with metal gridlines running between each panel, a necessity of mounting the panels in many solar setups. The Yoga lid’s BCCs move the mounting brackets and gridlines to the underside of the panel, maximizing their exposed, light-collecting surface area. A dynamic solar tracking system constantly measures the current and voltage, designed to adjust the charger’s settings to distribute the gathered energy most effectively.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
When you already have so little room to work with on a laptop lid, this is a significant benefit, if not outright needed to draw in enough light to be workable. With the panel design, Lenovo achieved just over a 24% “solar conversion rate”—that is, the percentage of sunlight turned into usable energy. That may not sound like a high percentage, but our Lenovo representative explained that this is toward the higher end of currently available panels, and only those pushing the envelope in testing have achieved a significantly better rate. It’s a lot of work to convert light into usable energy, and any sunlight above 0.3 watts will be absorbed. (The panels will also work with ambient light.)
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
The laptop itself and its specs are secondary to this design, since this is a concept laptop not intended for sale as it stands. Lenovo shared, regardless, that this system runs on Intel’s high-efficiency “Lunar Lake” Core Ultra 200 platform. The screen is a 14-inch OLED panel, and the chassis is a super-slim Yoga-style shell measuring 0.59 inch thick and weighing 2.68 pounds.
Putting Your Solar Panels to Work
How did it work in practice? Lenovo pulled up some custom software that showed the power draw and solar energy input, and handed us the device for a hands-on session. The software tracked the amount of light coming into the system, and indeed, putting the laptop up against the window, as opposed to under the conference-room lights, would increase the power draw rate. The utility provides a real-time readout of the wattage per minute coming into the system.
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)
Naturally, the light’s angle, the sun’s strength, and applications running on the laptop will all impact the energy draw and energy conversion ratio. As such, gauging the metrics is a fairly nebulous goal, but Lenovo estimates that 20 minutes of direct sunlight will translate to roughly one hour of video playback. It’s a fuzzy conversion rate, to be sure, but that summarizes the team’s experience in testing, so far, in the early life of this proof-of-concept machine.
We couldn’t take the laptop back to our lab or have a long enough session to cook up our own sunlight-to-battery-life formula, and any hard claims would need checking if this laptop was coming to market as a full retail product. But it does look to work as intended, drawing in power from the sunny window in our meeting room and slowly converting a portion of that into battery life. Whether the charging rate could outpace your workflow remains to be seen, and naturally, you would have to be able to stay near a strong-enough light source for long-term use without a wired charger.
We won’t be getting this one in for real lab testing anytime soon, unless Lenovo decides to bring this system to market after all, but it’s a fun idea and a cool prototype. It may be more practical than other concept PCs we’ve seen over the years, so who knows what will happen in the future? It’ll all be down to advances in the solar-panel tech, we suspect. In the meantime, we’ll continue carrying our clunky wired chargers and try to, um, keep it light.
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About Matthew Buzzi
Lead Analyst, Hardware
