Design and Implementation of a Prototypic Hybrid Power Supply System for Street Lighting

The energy consumption in lighting is increasing day by day. Lot of efforts have been made in order to minimize the energy consumption in lighting. As a part of it, new energy efficient lights, improved lighting design and advanced lighting controls are evolved. Photovoltaic (PV) is the best solution for the energy requirements in the future. This paper proposes a method to maximize the utilization of available solar energy for the efficient street lighting design. This paper presents the design and implementation of a grid-solar hybrid power supply scheme for LED street lighting. The existing street lighting scheme in a part of the University is studied, simulated on DIALux, a lighting analysis software and the problems are analyzed in detail. In order to overcome the problems, a more efficient lighting scheme is proposed. A prototype scaled down model of the proposed lighting scheme is designed and implemented. This scheme utilizes the solar energy in a more efficient way. A control strategy is developed for switching the lamps between solar and grid supply. The control principles and illumination design of the hardware and software are presented.