Solar street lights replace the street lights that are powered using grid electricity. Sunlight during the day is used to charge batteries that power the lights during the night.The lighting fixtures used are LED based and Solar PV modules (Solar Panels) are used to generate electricity tocharge batteries during the day. Solar street lights that have Solarpanels, batteries and controllers mounted on the pole have to have poles that are designed for the additional load and wind conditions.
Components of a Solar Street Light
Solar Panel
The solar panel is one of the most important parts of solar street lights, as the solar panel will convert solar energy into electricity. There are 2 types of solar panel: mono-crystalline and poly-crystalline. Conversion rate of mono-crystalline solar panel is much higher than polycrystalline Solar panel are varies from wattage systems.
Lighting Fixture
LED is usually used as lighting source of modern solar street light, as the LED will provide much higher Lumens with lower energy consumption. The energy consumption of LED fixture is at least 50% lower than HPS fixture which is widely used as lighting source in Traditional street lights. LEDs lack of warm up time also allows for use of motion detectors for additional efficiency gains.
Rechargeable Battery
Battery will store the electricity from solar panel during the day and provide energy to the fixture during night. The life cycle of the battery is very important to the lifetime of the light and the capacity of the battery will affect the backup days of the lights. There are usually 2 types of batteries: Gel Cell Deep Cycle Battery and Lead Acid Battery and many more.
Controller
Controller is also very important for solar street light. A controller will usually decide to switch on /off charging and lighting. Some modern controllers are programmable so that user can decide the appropriate change of charging, lighting dimming and also for timing and battery energy management and brightness control for optimizing use of the battery charge
Pole
Strong Poles are necessary to all street lights, especially to solar street lights as there are often components mounted on the top of the pole: fixtures, panels and sometimes batteries. However, in some newer designs, the PV panels and all electronics are integrated in the pole itself. Wind resistance is also a factor…
The current technologies use one set of controller, battery and solar PV panels for multiple poles thus optimizing the cost of the lighting system also making installation and maintenance of the lighting system simpler as the equipment is not pole mounted.This also allows the use of standard poles as there is no additional load on the poles.
