South Africa’s first solar-powered traffic lights
An eight traffic light intersection on Plantation Road in Montague Gardens, Cape Town has been retrofitted with LED lights, solar panels and batteries to make it South Africa’s first off-grid traffic light installation.
This site is a pilot project to assess the viability of solar to keep the lights working 24/7, as well as investigating whether the system can act seamlessly as a backup when the grid power goes down. Let’s hope that the former scenario is viable.
Apparently, a large traffic light installation such as this uses as much electricity in a month as a 3-bedroom house, and if Cape Town were to remove all its traffic lights from the grid, it would be equivalent to removing 1200 houses off mains power. I’d like to see some actual figures on traffic light electricity consumption - traffic typically lights use power-hungry halogen bulbs and are on all the time, but a 3-bedroom house has some veryhigh consumption electric equipment such as geysers and stoves. Regardless, any usage of sustainabe energy is a postive step.
I’m holding thumbs that this project is successful. Besides the direct environmental benefits that come from using sustainable energy sources, there’s a significant secondary benefit - if the traffic lights are more reliable than their grid-powered counterparts, we’ll see fewer malfunctioning traffic lights, resulting in less traffic congestion, which means less fuel burned.
A final worry - theft. Solar panels are very expensive, and from discussions I’ve had with people in the industry, it seems that a large percentage of panels in public spaces are stolen or damaged during attempted theft. Please let this not happen to the pilot project.
Source: allAfrica
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Solar power is definitely the way to go. I’m hoping this works as well so we can bring it to the U.S. Cheers!
This is not uncommon these days as more and more traffic lights are using ultra-bright LEDs. Although they consume huge amounts of energy as compared to normal LEDs, the power they require is nothing compared to those power hungry halogen lamps of old. Keeping this in mind, a moderate-sized solar panel can certainly power each traffic light for at least half of the day (better than nothing). With proper planning, it may even go up to 24 hrs. I’ll not be surprised. Currently there are solutions to power CCTVs 24/7 on the street using solar panels.
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