Solar-Powered Street Lights to Illuminate Parts of Baghdad
by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY on 07.15.08
photo by James Gordon
Baghdad may not be able to provide city residents enough electricity from the grid to keep the lights on in people’s homes and businesses for more than half the day, but the streetlights may soon may have a more reliable source of power. The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the Iraqi Electricity Ministry and the U.S. military are in the process of installing solar-powered street lighting throughout the capital.
Security Impetus For Solar Lighting
The Electricity ministry will be installing 5,000 of the lights at a cost of about $2,000 a piece, while the 1,000 being installed by the army have a price tag of $6,200 each due to the fact that they are bulletproof. Considering that increasing security is the main impetus behind the installation—besides the obvious benefit of added illumination, having the lights not tied to the grid means it will be harder for insurgents to disable large sections of illumination—the added cost of bulletproofing the lights may well be worth it.
Public reaction to the plan has been mixed. The article quotes one grocery store owner who says that the lights allow him to stay open late, but another small business owner points out, “Even if the streets are lit, if there is no electricity and our store is dark, no one can see us. What we really need is good national power.”
Solar Powered Lighting
Solar Powered LEDs Light Up Highways
Solar-Powered LED Lanterns: A Replacement for Kerosene?
Solar Powered LED Traffic Lights for India
How long will those last without being nicked?
Rgds
Damon
Nice. Now if they can BigBrother the city up like in London then maybe they can eliminate the guys burying IEDs and track down the guys building and firing the lob-bombs. Of course, once Baghdad is finally secured they still have the rest of the country to work on.
$6,000 per panel for one light? Peace would be a whole lot cheaper.
And how long till some enterprising individuals shimmies up the light pole and steals them all?
Unfortunately, safety in Iraq is not a matter of community policing. Going to be a while before you can get to that point.
Solar powered installations get stolen in America (a land with almost 0 crime in comparison to a place like Iraq) if the people don't have light, but the street lamps do a couple things are going to happen.
1. The people will simply steal them. I know a nice solar powered light would make my house better
2. Insurgents will cut down the pole's. The panels might be bullet proof but are they going to be making the poles out of saw/truck bashing into them proof material?
3. they will get dusty and stop working, just because the things are installed doesn't mean they have the funds/security to maintain them.
I think a much better use of this money would be to put solar panels ON THE HOUSES. Of course that would just mean that one person could steal another persons solar system etc.
Basically these sort of improvements are not going to work in a security situation like they have there. Sorry to be so negative but this just seems like good money thrown after bad. This whole war was a bad idea, this is just another one.
You have extremely little confidence in the military if you don't think they've considered an obvious problem like theft.
Obvious question:
Why are they not doing more with LED, solar powered streetlights in the United States?
In Richmond, VA, Dominion Power is subsidizing a lot of non-LED street lights just so they get additional energy usage.
Solar street lights were pioneered in the US on Air Force bases in Hawaii and Texas.
There are hundreds of thousands of solar/dynamo am/fm/sw radios in Afghanistan distributed by US and NATO forces since before the invasion. However, they only charge the internal hardwired battery inside the case. They do not charge AA batteries that can be used in other devices. An easy modification would change that and provide reliable low power DC electricity day or night, by sunlight or muscle power.
Here's a video that shows how to modify these solar/dynamo radios http://www.combatreform2.com/grundigradiobatterychargesolution.wmv
PS: I've been advocating this for over a year and talked last week with the staff of my Congresscritter about it. Day after tomorrow, I talk with an energy advisor to my state's Governor about using the same technology because Solar IS Civil Defense.