Stand-alone solar powered lighting solutions are made possible even in the Nordic region through a new, ground-breaking Danish project. An ideal collaboration between scientists from 4 different fields and private companies has succeeded in creating a system and a methodology that makes the impossible possible: Outdoor solar lighting which is not just a decoration.
At first glance, the best approach to make a solar powered outdoor lighting product work at winter in the far North is to go for state-of-the-art components: Photovoltaic panels, batteries and super effective LEDs. However, the heart of the systems is actually what binds these components together: The power supply and the battery management system.
With a very limited amount of PV power input during the short winter days, the energy conversion efficiency and the stand-by power consumption of the management system are crucial factors. In this project, a prototype channeled the power generated in the PV panel to the battery with an extreme efficiency of 98-99%. Most commercial LED power supplies consume 8-15% of the load. Nevertheless, the same prototype discharged a 10-25W output from the battery to the LED with an impressive conversion efficiency of 97.5%.
