Making Solar PV Street Light – A New Convention

Abstract

Today’s society is completely based on fossil fuels directly or indirectly for every aspect of its existence. The transformation from fossil fuels to green energy is essential for coming decade to mitigate sudden climate change and most importantly to ensure long term sustainability. Though this shifting works well in theory, but the reality is that shifting from fossil fuels is not so easy as it is considered to be most available convenient source of energy. Sustainable solution with modern creative ideas embedded with traditional practices, can reduce the dependency on fossil fuels on everything from energy to infrastructure. Today Light emitting diode (LED) lamps have replaced High intensity discharge (HID) lamps that were used at urban street light. Solar Street lights work on the principle of photovoltaic cell or solar cell. This paper presents an overview of the design and implementation of the solar PV street lights as a new convention in outdoor lighting technology. Solar PV Street lights eliminate the need of grid electricity, making it cost effective and environment friendly in urban and rural areas. The system’s components include solar panel, batteries, light sources, charge controllers and a pole structure. In short, this paper is based on the idea of maintaining the maximum utilization and minimum loss of available energy and also making an approach to increase the longevity of the system’s components with some common techniques and make a shift from conventional to non-conventional source of energy and thus a new convention is proposed.