The Autonoma: Self-Powered Programmable Street Lighting
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA on 02.10.08
When we covered Ross Lovegrove’s solar tree concept the response was pretty incredible. However, Lovegrove isn’t the only one working on street lighting that is capable of generating its own power (other examples can be seen here, here and here) and now we’ve heard from Paris-based designer Mauricio Clavero who has introduced us to his design, known as Autonoma. Here’s what Mauricio had to say about it:
“This solar public lighting pole is totally autonomous and can be placed in any isolated area where electricity is not available. Built with power LEDs which offer lighting performance and energy saving it also can be programmed. It also includes a motion detector, so when a pedestrian comes close the light intensity of the pole raises to full power, and decreases to a third to save energy when there is nobody around. It comes in two versions : urban and country side.
Unfortunately we couldn’t find any more information about the Autonoma on Mauricio’s website just yet, but we certainly like what we’ve seen so far. ::Mauricio Clavero:: via email::
Having dynamic power levels is a great idea! That is another benefit of LEDs over High Pressure Whatever isn't it? Traditional street lamps can't do power levels.
One thing I really really wish that our country (US) would do would be to mandate street lamp shades on all outdoor lighting. I dig orange clouds at night but I would like to see more stars wihen its clear. I haven't seen the Milky Way in probably over a decade :( . Dynamic light power levels could help with that.
I hope that future light technology will preserve our night skies as well - by minimizing upward light pollution...
Interesting thing about High Pressure Sodium: they are a point source light and are therefore omnidirectional. So, if a reflector is not used, much of the light is lost to an area in which it is not used. One could then say that effective efficiency is not 100lm/w but instead 50lm/w which is worse then LED.
People should also consider that HPS lamps produce a very "orange" light that isn't very useful to people. A lower lumen count with better visible electromagnetic spectrum coverage would be more useful for people.
Need a few of these on the local walk to the Metro here in Montreal... as cool as they look however, it would think they are at this point just conceptual. Love the concept. Someone start manufacturing them please.
The other thing to remember when you're designing street lighting is the sensor that will be receiving the light is the human eye, which has peak night vision sensitivity at about 507 nm wavelength; i.e. blueish green light.
So, if you use LEDs which output mostly 507 nm light, then for the same radiant intensity, the light looks brighter. More bang for buck, in other words, and since you want light to see things by, not full spectrum light, tuning the LED composition to be pretty much monochrome will also save power, and annoy astronomers less than lights with a bigger spectrum spread do.
just to note, i've received information from Mauricio who let me know that the product is now on the market and available at www.ambiance-lumiere.com