Solar Powered Street Lights - The future is LED

New developments: True Energy's expertise is in the use of renewable energy to effectively and economically replace traditional energy supplies. To balance the higher cost of solar electric power we continue to develop our systems to provide the optimum lighting levels at an affordable price.

LED Lighting: Solid-state lighting, using LEDs rather than incandescent gases or hot filaments, is seen as the next generation of lighting technologies. It produces a brighter light while using less power, potentially leading to cost savings and reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.

Realistically the technology is not yet mature both in terms of technical difficulties of using LEDs for lighting, especially streetlights and the cost of LEDs. There is continuing research at Manchester University who have teamed up with a UK LED specialist in a 12-month project to try and develop a practical LED Street Light prototype.

The majority of street lights in Europe are standardised on high pressure sodium lamps which replaced the 'orange' Sodium Street Lights back in the 1990s.

High pressure sodium street lights produce over 80 lumens per watt of power. Moving to LED lights we would see an almost doubling of efficiency producing 150 lumens per Watt of power.

Clearly a doubling of efficiency is a serious advantage though clerly not as great as the replacement of 'domestic' filament bulbs with CFLs where there is a 5 fold improvement and a further similar improvement when replaceing CFLs with LEDs.

The improvements that we will see when SOX is replaced by LED though not groundbreaking, will be significant. With solar powered street lamps, this will allow for smaller photovoltaic panels or batteries leading to significant overall cost benefits. Currently, with the high cost of LED bulbs, any savings in the cost of energy generation is largely outweighed by the higher cost of the light itself.

The availability of a cost effective and sufficiently bright LED street light will enhace both the traditional market for street lights and make solar powered street lights an ever more practical proposition, suited for an even wider range of applications.

see: Article in 'The Engineer'