Researchers aim for versatile street lights
Companies have been devising cheaper ways of powering street lights, and of allowing them to do more than illuminate a dark road.
In 2015, world leaders agreed in Paris, France, to keep global warming to within 2°C compared with pre-industrial times.
That means increasing global reliance on electricity from renewable sources, and on the batteries that can store it.
The EU has made a commitment that by 2020, 20% of the region’s energy will come from renewable sources.
According to Dr Thanh Trung Nguyen, physicist at Philips Research in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, who is leading a research project known as ‘BattMan’, the standard lead-acid batteries are cheap, but they only last about three years, and disposal poses an environmental problem.
The researchers at BattMan, a project funded by the EU’s ENIAC public-private partnership in nanoelectronics, began designing and developing a new lithium battery pack system for a solar street lamp that can endure tough environments.
Nguyen said: “Most batteries cannot handle a large range of temperatures, the impact of the environment is really big … cold is especially damaging.”
So far, there are a few demonstration lamps operating in several cities, including Eindhoven.
The race to develop batteries capable of sustaining the electric car revolution is intense. The BattMan project therefore also aims for a more mobile form of charging station.
A mobile charger gets round the fact that “in a big city, people don’t have a fixed spot where they can leave their electric car”, said Dr Felix Teufel, head of systems integration at BVB-Innovate in Stuttgart, Germany.
The mobile battery, of which six prototypes are being tested with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 instrument for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), can carry up to 85 kilowatt hours (kw/h) of energy. The 85kw/h version can thus charge four BMW i3 electric cars before needing to recharge itself.
For more information on the BattMan project, click here.
