Solar Lights

Posts Tagged ‘Solar Technology’

Industrial Solar Lights

I touched on industrial solar lights in the Hybrid Solar Lighting Technology article, but I would like to go into a bit more detail about some of the uses of solar lights in commercial application and some of the companies that are on the cutting edge of solar technology.

There are a number of companies that are leading the way for commercial solar lighting. One of those companies is Solar Cynergy. “Solar Cynergy manufactures high end architectural solar LED lighting for homes, developments and cities” as well as “an OEM line of Solar Photovoltaic Panels.” They are primarily a manufacturer and have distributors nation wide. Their product line is pretty unique in that they specialize in “solar inground lighting”. Their solar lights have been used in the Las Vegas Panorama Towers Luxury Condominium Project, the Granite Gables development project in Dallas, TX , and at the San Francisco Airport Hilton, to name just a few. I suggest visiting their website and blog to see all of the unique ways they use solar lighting technology.

Another company that specializes in industrial solar lights is OkSolar.com. They offer complete, tun-key solutions for solar lighting. They are mostly pole-mounted lights that come with everything except the pole. You can choose to supply the pole yourself, or have them quote you a separate price for the pole. These units can be used for: street lighting, area lighting, dock lights, lighting billboards, park lighting, parking lot lighting, walkway lighting, transit lighting, security lighting, etc.

If you are looking for a company that manufactures and sells a wide variety of solar lights, solar panels and complete solar systems, you could do worse than taking a look at Silicon Solar. These guys are international and widely respected. Take a look at their site. It’s a big site with lots of info.

As these companies are providing us with the opportunity to use solar power for more and more applications, researchers are working harder than ever to further solar technology to be cheaper to manufacture and be more efficient. At the University of Washington, a team of experts headed by David Ginger has been experimenting with manufacturing solar cells out of organic plastic polymers. Paul Berger and his team of researchers has found that adding silver nanoparticles to the polymers allows for an almost 12% increase in their efficiency. Meanwhile at the University of Texas, Brian Korgel and his team are working on a Solar Ink, that can be basically painted onto buildings. Innovalight, a company out of Sunnyvale, CA. is using silicon ink patterned on top of silicon wafers to boost the efficiency of solar cells. While most researches are aiming for a goal of 10% efficiency out of their solar cells, Innovalight boasts an efficiency rating of 18%!

As you can see, we have come a long way with solar technology in a relatively short period of time. Entire homes and businesses are being solar powered and solar lights are everywhere. It will not be long before we will no longer be dependent on fossil fuels for our home and business energy needs.

Hybrid Solar Lighting Technology

With the increased use of solar lights in residential and commercial applications, there is a push for more advanced technologies to integrate solar lights into more and more applications. One such technology is called “ hybrid lighting technology”. Artificial lighting accounts for the largest percentage of electricity use in commercial buildings in the United States. Hybrid solar lighting provides a promising new way to reduce energy consumption while also delivering increased benefits associated with natural lighting in commercial buildings.

solar lights dish

Hybrid solar lighting contributes to meeting the requirements set by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 for renewable energy consumption by the federal government to be not less than 3% in FY 2007–2009, 5% in FY 2010–2012, and 7.5% in 2013 and thereafter.

The technology behind hybrid solar lights was originally developed for fluorescent lighting applications but recently has been enhanced to work with many other applications. One of those applications is to replace incandescent accent-lighting sources, such as the parabolic aluminized reflector (PAR) lamps commonly used in retail spaces. Many commercial building owners—specifically retailers—use the low-efficiency PAR lamps because of their desirable optical properties and positive impact on sales. Yet the use of this inefficient lighting results in some retailers’ spending 55–70% of their energy budgets on lighting-related energy costs.

Hybrid solar lights have the potential to greatly reduce energy consumption while also maintaining or exceeding lighting quality requirements. Implementation of the hybrid solar lighting technology across the U.S. would significantly increase energy savings to the country and would provide building owners with a higher quality, energy-efficient, and economically viable alternative to incandescent lamps. Artificial lighting accounts for almost a quarter of the energy consumed in commercial buildings and 10–20% of energy consumed by industry. Solar lights can significantly reduce artificial lighting costs in many commercial and industrial buildings and in institutional facilities such as schools, libraries, and hospitals.

Future research and development is aimed at increasing the performance and reliability of solar lighting technology as well as extending the application of these systems to work with newly emerging solid-state lighting sources. Hybrid solar lights deliver the benefits of natural lighting with the advantages of an electric lighting system – flexibility, convenience, reliability, and control – while saving energy and money and helping to reduce the demand for non-renewable energy sources.

For more information about Hybrid Solar Lighting technology, you may want to check out the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They earned the Excellence in Technology Transfer Award from the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer in 2007, an R&D 100 Award and a Southeast Region Federal Laboratory Consortium Award during 2006.

Usage and Benefits of Solar Lighting

Many of you have seen the little solar lights that are used as accent lights in gardens or along walkways or whatnot to add aesthetic appeal to a home’s landscaping. In fact, when most people hear the term “solar lights”, that is usually the picture that pops into their head. With the mindset of our society going more and more toward “green technology” (rightly so), we are seeing more and more of these green lighting solutions. A quick internet search will show that, not only are the solar landscape accent lights very popular,

Outdoor Solar Lights

but there are a lot of other types as well. We see motion sensing solar lights, spot lights, flood lights, commercial perimeter lighting, and many others. In fact, some cities are even upgrading street lights to solar power.  It is also possible to have indoor solar lights and solar skylights!

Not long ago, solar technology was such that it was not practical for use with many lighting applications. The solar cells just couldn’t hold enough juice to keep the lights lit for very long. Great advancements have since been made in solar technology facilitating the use of solar security lights, solar post lights, solar flood lights, etc. These advancements include the increased use of nickel cadmium batteries to store the energy collected from the solar cells and LED lights that put out more illumination and use much less energy than more tradition forms of lights.

So what are the benefits of using solar lights as opposed to more traditional lighting solutions? The most obvious advantage would be that they use a free, renewable source of energy – the Sun. Yes, the batteries do need to be replaced every couple of years or so, but if you compare the cost of the batteries to the cost of the electricity you will save, you will find that the savings is significant. The carbon footprint on our environment is also much, much smaller.

Another big advantage to using solar lights is that each light is its own self contained unit. That means that if you have a set of lights, and one of the lights fails, the rest of the lights continue to operate. If the power to your home is interrupted, your solar lights continue to function. You also don’t have to worry about running wires from one light to the next to a power source – they are wireless lights!

As you can see there are many uses for and benefits to going with solar lights. Please check back often for more in depth articles about the improving technology, uses for, and benefits of going with solar lights. Please feel free to contact me with any questions or topics you would like covered. Our next topic will be outdoor solar lights.