Energy-neutral solar-powered street lighting with predictive and adaptive behaviour

Street lighting can enhance the safety and security of residential and commercial areas. However, its installation and operation is expensive: cables must be installed, and power is drawn from the grid which is typically dominated by non-renewable sources. A potential solution is the use of solar energy to power individual street lights locally. However, with limited energy storage and variable solar availability, existing lighting control strategies are unsuitable for this application. This paper describes the extension of an existing grid-powered street light management scheme, which responds to vehicles and pedestrians by dynamically changing the brightness of street lights in their vicinity, setting an optimal pattern of lighting. The proposed scheme, TALiSMaN-Green, achieves energy-neutral solar-powered operation. It maintains a consistent level of usefulness of street lights across a complete overnight period, regardless of the amount of energy stored at the beginning of the night. Unlike existing schemes, which may run out of energy during the night, it learns the dynamics of traffic volumes and sunrise times and budgets energy accordingly.