COMPARING TRADITIONAL STREET LIGHTS VS SOLAR POLES
Due to growing energy costs, falling solar panel and battery prices, and the development of new renewable energy technology, solar street lights are becoming a more widely used choice to illuminate public spaces. These factors make solar street lights a dependable and efficient solution. In this article, we'll compare solar-powered LED street lights with regular street lights to better comprehend all the advantages of solar-powered LED street lights.
Particularly project and facility managers are particularly interested in coming up with innovative strategies to keep maintenance and utility expenses to a minimum. To accomplish this objective, solar-powered LED street lighting can be a fantastic choice. Not just as a means of illumination, but also as a tool for producing clean energy.
How do conventional and solar street lights function?
Street lights and poles powered by solar energy give illumination without relying on grid electricity. They are totally energy independent and not tied to the infrastructure of the electrical grid. Solar panels or photovoltaic modules collect sunlight throughout the day and transform it into energy, which is then kept in a battery system. The solar charge controller, which regulates battery storage capacity and solar charging voltage and provides a longer lifespan for the complete solar lighting system, is the brain of the solar lighting system. LED illumination is powered by the energy that has been accumulated throughout the night.
Traditional street lights (metal halide or high-pressure sodium) are powered by the conventional electrical grid, which uses energy from non-renewable sources like fossil fuels.
Environmental and Renewable Energy Showcase
Since they employ renewable energy sources that are secure and excellent for the environment, solar-powered LED street lights and poles are built with very little environmental effect. Every day, the solar lighting system draws power from the sun and emits no damaging CO2.
Efficiency of Lighting
The newest LED technology is employed in solar-powered LED street lights and poles to produce lights that are brighter and more powerful while using less energy. Additionally, LED lights last longer, with a lifetime of more than 80,000 hours, compared to the 10,000–15,000 hours of service life and substantially greater failure rate of conventional street lights. The colour rendering index (CRI) of metal halide and high pressure sodium lamps is substantially lower than that of LED lights, which have superior visibility and a variety of distribution patterns.
Street Light Cost Comparison: Traditional vs. Solar
Lifetime Price
When compared to conventional street lights, the initial investment in off-grid solar LED street lights is often twice as large if we solely take into account the purchase price. However, during an 8-year period, the cost of installing, maintaining, and powering typical street lights per unit varies from 7,000 to 10,000 USD, whereas the cost of solar-powered street-powered LED light/poles is estimated at 3,500 to 5,000 USD.
Cost of Installation
Traditional street lights need wire and underground trenching to connect to grid lines, which adds significantly to the expense of new installations in remote regions. Solar powered LED street lights are considerably simpler to install. Only a concrete foundation and solar pole installation are required. Installation took less than an hour overall for one solar pole.
To give you an idea of the labour and material expenses involved in installing a typical street light, trenching and cabling may cost anywhere between $25 and $50 per foot. For your project, you would require at least 30 feet of trenching and cabling, depending on where the transformer is located. These procedures not only add to the expense but take a lot of time, which might delay your project and lead to other issues.
Cost of Maintenance
When it comes to street lighting, maintenance costs are a persistent issue that facility and municipal management must deal with. While the lifespan of an LED light is more than ten years, that of a sodium bulb is just five years. Additionally, the maintenance costs of LED street lights are about 70% lower than those of conventional sodium or metal halide lights thanks to the development of new "Smart" technologies that enable remote administration and control from a single central location.
Depending on the battery type (VRLA or LiFePO4) and of course the battery manufacturer, solar-powered LED street light/pole batteries need to be replaced every 5-7 years. For instance, EnGoPlanet exclusively uses top-notch batteries from the United States and Europe. To ensure system stability, it is crucial to use high-quality batteries from the outset of your solar lighting project.
Smart Technology for Solar-Powered Street Lights is Introduced
Solar energy costs have dropped considerably, and they are expected to continue to decline.
Intelligent hardware and software communication technologies may enhance and extend the capabilities of solar-powered LED street lights into data-driven information services with high LED light energy efficiency and enhanced return on investment for investors. Using cloud-based software for remote management of each street light unit in real-time enables the integration of motion sensors, dimming features, and wireless networks to send useful data back to the utility, company, or infrastructure provider with information on their energy generation and light performance. Additionally, this software may provide problem alerts, which can reduce maintenance costs by approximately 60% in terms of labour costs. This is because visits to the lights that require repair will be arranged, as opposed to today, when employees must go on the predetermined weekly control visits, which are both time- and money-consuming.
By enhancing battery life and performance, LED light life and dependability as important components of solar powered LED street light/pole, these new advances greatly cut maintenance costs. There are several prospects for widespread solar deployment thanks to the remote management of solar-powered LED street lighting.
When you consider solar-powered LED street lights/poles as a tool to improve your city's and facility's energy resilience, the benefits keep growing because solar-powered lights will function even in the event of a natural disaster that could result in blackouts and power outages.
While we at BENWEI are hard at work creating new choices that will decrease overall cost while enhancing performance, we are also working hard to enhance our current Solar powered LED street light systems.
