Fossil Fuel to Solar Power: A Sustainable Technical Design for Street Lighting in Fugar City, Nigeria

This paper presents a study on replacing the usage of fossil fuel energy with solar energy for lighting the dark and depressing streets of Fugar city, Nigeria. Fugar city is quite populated area without any street lights, almost every house use fossil energy to light up the streets which they access. The main objective is to select best solution among diesel generators, grid electricity, on-site solar photovoltaics and off-site solar photovoltaics. In order to have a sustainable solution for lighting up 210 LED street lights, the four proposed solutions were analyzed based on their technical feasibility, environmental parameters like CO2 emission analysis and cost analysis with simple payback periods. Analysis showed that, on-site solar photovoltaics is best among the other three proposed solutions in terms of technical and financial feasibility with almost negligible emissions leading to sustainability. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.