How Solar Street Lamps Benefit Cities

Solar energy as a new energy source. It has the characteristics of clean, efficient and inexhaustible. In the urban construction reality, in order to achieve carbon neutrality, governments have taken the use of solar energy resources as an important part of national sustainable development strategies. Face photovoltaic power generation has the advantages of safety, reliability, no noise, no pollution, low failure rate, and easy maintenance.

How can you find the best way for your city to cut energy costs and achieve “zero emissions”? One of the most effective ways is to use the sun to generate electricity. Solar street lights are used as the main lighting system in urban lighting projects. Build sustainable communities with outdoor solar streetlights. Solar street lights can not only provide high efficiency LED lights. It can also connect to the Internet of Things to provide surveillance video, wireless Internet access, remote control and public broadcasting.

Solar street lamps help removes energy bills

Solar energy is that it’s free!

Let’s take a 80W conventional street light for example, using 12 hours of electricity for one night: 80WX12hr=960Wh, almost 1 kWh. Conventional solar street light get power from the grid, which can be costly over time. How much? In the US for example $0.15/KWh, which is about $0.144/night for a 80W street light.

So let’s say you have 160 lights on a 5KM road. This is not uncommon. So, let’s do the math, that’s $690 per month in energy expenses. Over the course of a decade, just 160 lights equals $82,800.

And that’s just for a 5KM road. Imagine how many roads there are in the city. But with solar street lights, you don’t have any energy costs. Using the energy provided by the inexhaustible sun to power the lights means you pay zero for energy usage each month.

No trenching or cable costs

The second way solar street lights save you money is the ease of installation. As mentioned earlier, each solar light is a self-contained system, so this means that you can skip paying for trenching, wiring and labor altogether when installing your street lights. All that is needed is to ensure that the light posts are mounted securely.
Digging trenches can be very expensive. Depending on the proximity of the project site, the condition of the soil and other factors, prices can vary by linear foot. You’ll need to rent equipment and hire a professional to do the labor. Then there are backfill costs.

The average percentage price savings for a solar lighting project, from the initial quote to the first night of operation, is often 20-30% over traditional street lights, and in some projects can even be as high as 40%, depending on the needs of the project.

In addition, a good quality solar road can often last a minimum of 8-10 years or more with very little maintenance, and a properly designed solar light has about 3-5 days of autonomy, and the light will work as usual even on cloudy days. Even in the case of natural or man-made disasters, such as earthquakes and fires that damage the power grid, they can still provide stable lighting.

Clean energy and environmentally friendly

It is well known that solar street lights use renewable energy instead of fossil fuels, which contributes a lot to the sustainability of the city. The installation of solar street lights also avoids damage to the environment as there is no need to excavate power lines. It brings long-term benefits to the city.