Switch them all off, save the world and stop light polution.

We switched the street lights off when we defeated Hitler – so why not now? It might bring back some good old British Tommy community spirit! Just what we need right now.

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How about stopping any light escaping upwards – better reflectors – will make them light the area better (maybe remove some when it does).

Also it would cut out that horrid dirty Red haze in clouds that indicates Telfords’ location at night.

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Sam: How will switching street lights off effect burglars – surely the houses they burgle don’t have street lights inside them?

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Telford and Wrekin Council are already working on this technology – well almost. They are fitting cutting edge technology to the new streetlights initially at Lawley but being rolled out as they renew the lights. This will allow them to monitor faults and turn the lights either down or off at night in selected areas.
AS for solar power, the current bulbs on main roads are 250 or 400 watts and take a serious amount of juice. Daylight would probably be blocked by the solar panels needed but lets hope technology carries on progressing so maybe in afew years, solar power, LED and dimming \ black outs are more widely used.

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lucy w when there is complete darkness they sneak up your street and burgle your house or mug you it is a fact that is why you should keep your hedges down to stop them hiding in the darkness
in these dire economic times crime is going to get worse

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As for Lemgo’s streetlighting – it’s only a pilot, and hasn’t gone down very well and is not going any further.

What Huw failed to point out that you have to send a premium rate text for the light to come on for 15mins – those Germans have not taken to the idea, being very resourceful they are using the light from there mobile phone to guide them.

In Rahden it cost about £5 to have you street light on for 2 hours, although Lembo has a different charging scheme of about 50p for 15 minutes. Anyone want to pay that on top of your council tax?

Interestingly there has been no increase in accidents which shows that street light do nothing to prevent accidents. Stupid people cause accidents.

Therefore I can see no good reason why we don’t switch them off altogether and follow Lemgo, and let people pay by text if they want them on.

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Just one small observation…..

You CAN’T power lights directly from solar power, as of course when the lights are on, it’s DARK , and hence the electricity obtained from the solar cells during daylght hours needs to be STORED, and that means rechargeable batteries – NOT very efficient!.

And …

NOT a very elegant solution is it??

SURELY the priority is to generate electricity in plentiful supply from many renewable sources, that can power whatever electrical loads demand it, at ant time of the day.

And I CERTAINLY don’t want to go back to the 19th century when there was no street lighting.

IF EVER there was a criminals charter, then having no street lighting is it.

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Dear Mr Rollinson,

Using the sun’s power to provide our lighting seems an ideal and timely solution, after all there is enough energy reaching the planet every 40 minutes to provide all the power used by the population of the earth every year.

However, there is no technology currently available that can convert this solar radiation directly into electricity in an efficient enough manner to light our streets.

As an example, many systems on the market use photovoltaic or PV panels that typically have a conversion rate of between 12-18% of available energy, although there has just been a breakthrough in photovoltaic design with a prototype panel reaching 40% , so watch this space.

The more efficient the PV panel the smaller the panel needs to be to provide enough electricity.

If we were to use available PV technology on a sodium street lamp, we would need a panel area of about 1.6m2, plus a battery storage system and inverter. This would provide enough power to light one lamp from dusk to dawn during the months of April to September but only four hours in the winter when we see less daylight.

No small consideration is the cost, around £2,500 per street lamp.

Calculating average savings made by converting to solar, it would take each street lamp approximately 20-30 years to pay back this initial expenditure, and during this time the batteries would need replacing two or three times.

A more productive avenue for the future may be to look at solar thermal, a method of heating hot water by extracting the Sun’s energy.

This elegant technology has an energy conversion rate of up to 88v per cent and is much cheaper. The challenge lies in finding a way of converting heat directly to electricity, then we could ease the global warming crisis in an instant and save money.

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