Posted February 05, 2019 07:17:46 A report has revealed that in the next three years, a significant number of the world’s cities will be installing solar powered lighting.
The report by the UN-sponsored International Council for Sustainable Development, which monitors the development of sustainable energy, says that more than half of the global population now has access to a car and about 70 percent of the population have electricity.
Solar lights are more cost effective, produce lower greenhouse gas emissions and are cleaner than traditional incandescent light bulbs, which emit mercury and other harmful gases.
However, they are also more energy intensive to run than incandescents and require more space in their housings, a cost that can be prohibitive for many cities.
In fact, only 3 percent of cities have installed solar panels, and the majority of those have not even installed the latest technologies, the report said.
The UN report says that while there is a lot of interest in the technology, a lack of data on the size of cities and how quickly they are installing them is limiting its effectiveness.
The US, Germany, Japan, Australia and Sweden have all reported their progress on installing solar-powered traffic lights, with the UK on track to have its first by 2030.
“The world needs a new paradigm to make light-emitting devices affordable and effective,” said Richard Tait, the UN’s deputy secretary-general for energy and climate change.
“The development of smart cities is a key driver in this direction.”
Tail lightsThe report, released on Wednesday, said that by 2025, there will be almost 10 million LED lights on the roads and that the demand for these will be “a key driver” for the world to transition to a low-carbon future.
The first phase of the development will involve installing 1.3 million LED streetlights around the world by 2020, with a goal of creating 2.5 million LED “headlight” headlamps by 2025.
The study predicts that by 2030, there should be nearly 100 million headlamp-mounted lamps worldwide.
The majority of headlamped devices on the road will be small enough to be used by pedestrians, cyclists and those who do not have a vehicle.
It will be possible to make LED street lighting small enough that they are easily concealed by a car, said Mark McVean, chief executive of the British Association for Lighting Research.
He said the next stage will involve the deployment of LED “light-emission” bulbs.
The headlams will produce a green beam which, like a typical LED bulb, is visible and provides light in the form of a colour that can also be detected by the human eye.
However, they will emit less pollution than incanders and emit less energy.
Tait said that while LED lamps could provide “a very useful alternative to incandes”, the cost of building the new lighting technology is significant.
“It is going to be very difficult to build them at a reasonable cost,” he said.
“If you are going to build something with a lot less power, you will have to pay for the energy of that plant.”
In its report, the International Council says that cities will need to adopt a “green” approach to lighting, such as installing more efficient streetlights that use a more efficient and less polluting version of incandene.
In order to ensure that the new lamps are more energy efficient and cost effective to install, the Council suggests that cities build lighting “stations” or “lights stations” that can capture more sunlight than the streetlights.
“We are not saying that we want every city to have a light station,” McVane said.
“We want them to be able to get the best from them.”
Tait agrees that it is essential to invest in the development and deployment of the technologies.
But he said that it would not be possible for every city that wants to become a greener city to adopt all of the innovations at once.
“You cannot invest in everything, but you can invest in a lot at a time,” he added.
“And so we need to be investing in light-generation stations to provide that capacity in a timely fashion.”
McVane acknowledged that the cost and efficiency of light-solar lighting is not yet fully understood.
But he said he is optimistic that by 2020 cities could have installed enough LED lights to make them competitive with incanden lights, and said that this will be enough to meet the increasing demand for lighting in cities.
“For some cities, the demand is so great, the lighting needs to be bigger than the lights in a street,” he explained.
“There are other cities where the demand has not been that great, and so they will be able install lights in more compact buildings and still be competitive.”