Discover more on how lighting can help to meet Green Deal targets.
pd12ing03 > 12-03-2021, 06:30 AM
Discover more on how lighting can help to meet Green Deal targets.
This paper examines the gap between the design and in-situ performance of solar streetlight interventions in two humanitarian settings. Displaced settlements often lack street lighting and electricity. Given that off-grid solar streetlights produce surplus energy, we hypothesized that this energy could be made available for daily usage, to improve system performance and provide further energy access to displaced populations. We recognize, however, that solar streetlight performance and longevity have typically been poor in remote and refugee settings. Eleven solar streetlights were fitted with ground-level sockets and their performance monitored, in two displaced settlements: a refugee camp in Rwanda and an internally displaced population settlement in Nepal. Considerable performance gaps were found across all eleven systems. Inefficient lights and mismatching system components were major issues at both sites, reducing targeted designed performance ratios by 33% and 53% on average in Rwanda and Nepal, respectively. The challenges of deploying these types of systems in temporary settlements are outlined and a number of suggestions are made to guide future developments in the design and implementation of sustainable solar streetlight interventions.
Today's solar street LED lights are able to provide reliable, quality lighting both in developing and developed countries, thereby reducing light poverty and the economic and environmental costs of electric outdoor lighting. Rapid technical innovation and dramatic price reduction in the LED, PV module, and battery components, which has occurred in the last 5 years, will accelerate the penetration of solar street LED lights across the world. Applications will not be limited to countries with significant insolation only but will extend to Northern regions as well. This study provides a critical overview of a technology that will play an important role en route to global sustainability. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
In 2016, on the northern shore of Lake Victoria, Jinja City sat in darkness. The city, the second-largest in Uganda, had run up an overdue power bill of 1.3 billion Ugandan shillings ($3.5 million), so Umeme, the nation’s largest energy distributor, disconnected the city’s street lights.
Even before Umeme cut the power, most roads in this city of 870,000 near the source of the White Nile lacked illumination: Only the colonial-era center of town was equipped with solar garden light, and many of these had begun to sputter out due to age and poor maintenance. Districts that had grown as unplanned areas on the outskirts before being incorporated into the city had never been lit at all. “The area in the city that is planned is quite small,” says Kennedy Kibedi, a social media marketing specialist who works in tourism in Jinja City. “On the fringes of the city, in the suburbs, there’s a lot of informal development.”
That pattern holds true for many of Africa’s largest cities. As places like Nairobi, Lagos, and Kampala have grown, they’ve absorbed informal settlements that aren’t connected to national power grids. As a result, street lighting is scarce, scattered and unreliable, and the costs for installing conventional grid-based lighting are high.
So Jinja City administrators looked to neighboring Kampala, the nation’s capital and its largest city, for an alternative solution: solar-powered street lights, powered not by the grid but by photovoltaic panels and batteries that are either attached to each light pole or housed at a mini power station to support a group of lights.
The Kampala Capital City Authority began revamping that city’s street lighting with solar-powered equipment in 2014, when just 115 kilometers of 1,200 kilometers of roads in Kampala had street lights, and only a fraction of those were operational. By 2016, when Jinja City was grappling with its power cut, the success of Kampala’s program was already apparent. Reports published that year show that the new solar spot light had reduced energy usage and costs, decreased traffic fatalities and accidents, and helped foster a more vibrant night economy in the capital city.