Skip to main content

From sunlight to street light

A zero-emission LED street light which its Danish developer, Scotia, claims eliminates electricity costs and feed energy back into the grid has been installed in a car park in Copenhagen for seven years and, says have consistently produced five per cent above their initially predicted yield, with no fall-off. Commissioned by the Danish Government and the United Nations as examples of future zero-emission street lighting for the COP 15 Conference on Climate Change which was held there in December 2009,
March 23, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
A zero-emission LED street light which its Danish developer, Scotia, claims eliminates electricity costs and feed energy back into the grid has been installed in a car park in Copenhagen for seven years and, says have consistently produced  five per cent above their initially predicted yield, with no fall-off.

Commissioned by the Danish Government and the United Nations as examples of future zero-emission street lighting for the COP 15 Conference on Climate Change which was held there in December 2009, the lights have been in continuous operation since then with minimal maintenance and no cleaning.

Each of the Scotia masts has been generating 240kwh per year, which the company says means that this small installation of just seven masts has already saved nearly seven tons of CO2 in its short lifetime.

Developed by British lighting expert Steven Scott for his Danish lighting company Scotia, the Monopole converts sunlight to street light by using photovoltaic (PV) panels attached to the four sides of a post. The energy can then be stored in a battery and used at night.

Scotia believes that the increasing cost of running streetlights which is causing some councils in the UK to dim or switch off street lights, could be cut by using the Monopole in addition to reducing to CO2 emissions. It claims that if a local authority with 33,000 traditional street lights converted them all to Monopoles, which can last for 25 years, the maintenance cost would be reduced by around a quarter each year, whilst also making a profit for the council.

Monopole can also run off-grid and be connected with other Monopoles to provide a micro-power grid for developed and developing countries. Earlier versions of the streetlights have also been installed in Nigeria, UAE and Saudi Arabia and can even be powered throughout the year using just ambient light.

Related Content

  • May 23, 2017
    ReachNow installs 20 public EV charging stations in Seattle
    BMW’s ReachNow car-sharing service has installed the first of 20 Light & Charge electric vehicle (EV) charging locations in Seattle, US, as part of a US$1.2 million investment by the BMW Group. Seattle is the first city in North America to make the award-winning Light & Charge system, which turns existing streetlights into EV charging stations, available to the public.
  • April 7, 2017
    Clean diesel technology most cost-effective way to reduce emissions, officials told
    The state environmental policymakers attending the Spring Meeting of the US Environmental Council of States (ECOS) have heard how states can achieve the most cost-effective and immediate air emission reductions by targeting the largest sources of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) emissions and replacing or upgrading those with the newest generation of clean diesel technology. Allen Schaeffer, executive director of the Diesel Technology Forum, highlighted the environmental benefits of new diesel technology dur
  • July 30, 2012
    Green Light WIM
    Beginning in the 1990s, Oregon was one of the first US states to use weigh-in-motion scales and transponder-based systems to enable trucks to avoid having to stop at weigh stations. Its Green Light preclearance system soon became a model for similar deployments throughout the country. Today, Green Light annually weighs and screens 1.6 million trucks as they approach 21 Oregon weigh stations and it preclears 1.5 million of them.
  • June 22, 2021
    Hydrogen: transportation's silver bullet?
    As the quest for carbon-neutrality becomes a key political and economic driver, everyone is on the lookout for new sources of energy - so perhaps hydrogen’s time has come