Design and Development of Energy-Free Solar

Street LED Light System

Mokhtar Ali1, Mohamed Orabi1, Emad Abdelkarim1, Jaber A. Abu Qahouq 2 and Abdelali El Aroudi3
1
APEARC, South Valley University, Aswan 81542, Egypt
2
Electrical and Computer Eng. Dept., The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487, USA
3
Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
orabi@ieee.org

Abstract-- Today, all count words are about how to enhance
the electrical grid reliability during the peak instant. The direct
solution for the grid is to cut off some loads to keep its stability.
One of these loads is the street lighting especially during the
summer period. This paper proposes an energy-free system for
street lighting as there is no power demand from the grid. A
standalone solar street LED light system is proposed. The
proposed system consists of a PV panel, storage system, LED
lamp, power conditioning system (PCS) and the controller which
can manage the power direction and system operation. Using
LED in lighting applications has many advantages compared to
other lamp. It is very efficient (very high efficiency lighting
source) lamps and cost effective (the life time is very long
compare to other lamps). In additions to, it needs low dc voltage
source to be operated. The storage system will be charged during
the day time using the available sunlight. On the other hand,
during the night time the controller will give a signal to the
system to connect the LED lamp to be ready for use. Since the
LED needs a low dc voltage to be operated, a simple dc-dc
converter will be enough for this system resulting in decreasing
the cost of the overall system. Moreover, a low cost
microcontroller is proposed to handle the operation of the whole
system. Applying this idea in the Egyptian streets enables the
reduction of more than 50 % of the total required energy by HID
lamps that enable the use for small PV system. By this proposed
system, streets can be illuminated with lower power lamps, no
operating costs, no CO2 emissions, grid energy-free and
environmentally friendly. Moreover, the proposed solution can
solve the Egyptian peak point crisis of load demand.
Index Terms-- energy-free system, LED, microcontroller, PV
panel, street lighting.
I. INTRODUCTION
Today world is facing an energy shortage due to the
increase of the average consumption of energy per capita. This
led to continuous decrease of the world storage of oil and
natural gaz. Also pollution problems have been highlighted as
the source of stresses on the ground life. Therefore,
Renewable Energy Technologies have drawn tremendous
interest worldwide to find solutions for world energy crisis.
Recently PV systems have found fairly wide applications from
large scale PV plants with cumulative power reaches
approximately a few tenths of GWp were connected to
reaching the grid of a small scale PV reaching approximately a
few tenths of Watts in applications such as Camera, watches,
Mobiles, etc. One of these PV applications is the standalone
street lighting system using the most efficient and the cost
effective Light Emitting Diode (LED) lamps. This system
consists of PV panel, high quality battery, LED lamp, dc-dc
converter, and a controller.
This system is not only an environmentally friendly option
(requiring no power input plus free of pollution), but can also
be located anywhere regardless of local grid availability. The
power source is a solar power which is recognized as being an
environmentally ''clean'' form an energy production point of
view. PV arrays utilize the sun radiation to produce electricity.
These modules do not require fuel to operate.
On the other hand, most current street lighting uses high
intensity discharge lamps. Recently, searching for new street
lighting modules has gained a lot of attention to reduce the
amount of energy consumed by this type of lamp and also to
reduce the amount of CO2 emissions. LEDs with their current
performances have proved themselves to be the most suitable
solution for LED street lighting, [1] and [2]. The LED lamp
offers many advantages such as: extremely long life, 100,000
hours, extreme robustness as there are no glass components or
filaments, no external reflector, a modular construction, no
emissions like HID lamps and most importantly their high
efficiency. LEDs are good light source; their efficiency is 160
Lm/W. So, using this type of lamps enables the reduction of
more than 50 % of the total energy used by HID lamps; that by
its order reduces the required PV arrays. Therefore, applying
the proposed system, streets can be illuminated with lower
power lamps, no operating costs, no CO2 emissions and
environmentally friendly [3] - [4].
Due to the importance of the issue, there are many
companies around the world that are now involved in
developing, building, and producing these products of street
light. Also there is a variety of products with wide range of
power and wide range of lamp type used. Figure 1 and 2 show
examples of the solar street LED light system produced by
GEO-Technik [5].
Fig. 1: LED Solar Pathway Light model LT-SOL10.
 Fig. 2: Solar Street Light LED model LT-SOLAR051-220L.
(a)
The Solar Illumination Project in Beijing Olympic Wrestling Venue Lamps
LSL0733-7325LD30W/24 Pole height:7 meters Distance between two poles:
15 meters Road width: 10 meters Solar energy system: 80W Quantity:10 PCS.
(b)
The Lingqiu County Solar Illumination Project in Datong of Shanxi Province
Pole height烉7meters, Distance between two poles) 20m, Road width:15m,
LSL0733-7325LD30W/24, quantity: 150pcs
Fig. 4: A few existence examples of solar light street applications.
They are Sandstorm- and weatherproof PV street lighting
fixture, equipped with high power LED Chip with power
range of 100 W and 120 W, respectively. By the use of LED
lamps and microcontroller system control, we think that its
application could be interesting as they have a long
maintenance-free life time. Figure 3 shows another model of
Fig. 3: solar LED Street lighting (EverGEN™ 1500 Series).
(c)
This project is located in the Shipai Wetland Park. The park is located at the
West part of Dongguan with a planned area of 280,000 square meters. Based
on Kingsun Solar-Wind LED Street Light Project in Songshan Lake,
Dongguan Government decides to use Kingsun Solar-Wind LED Street Light
in this project. The pole in this area is 10 meters height, we suggest our client
to using the KS-E108TX Solar-Wind LED Street Light system in this project.
(d)
This shows you BBE LU2 in Calama city of Chile, solar LED street light is a
very good choice for the clean energy with the sustainable development.
street light LED lamp, it is EverGEN™ 1500 Series produced
by Solar Street Lights Company [6]. Figure 4 shows a few
existing examples of solar street light applications that
confirm that this proposed idea is a practical one. Looking into
the practicality of the idea and its suitability for Egypt, we
think that its application in this country could give interesting
results. The main reasons behind that: Egypt is one from the
main counties where PV can be connected and have high
power generation at anywhere and the sunlight is available for
long day time. Egypt today has problems of CO2 emissions
and a lot of pollutions. Recently Egypt has a problem with
peak load demand that forces the companies to disconnect
some regions from electricity to keep the stability of the grid.
Also, Egypt has new long roads far away from the grid whose
connection to the grid will be too costly. Moreover, the new
policies in Egypt require using free and renewable energy. All
these factors are pushing the direction of using the proposed
system. However, it should be manufactured locally to reduce
the system manufacturing cost. However, it should be
manufactured locally to reduce the system manufacturing cost
from one side and to create a locally expect and cheap
maintenance system from the other side. Therefore, its design
steps and modes should be understood and adopted based on
every country requirements and sources.
Fig. 5: Energy consumed in Egypt by purpose in year 2008/2009.
Fig. 6: Load demand before and after using the proposed system.
II. EGYPT LOAD DEMAND AND EMERGED PROBLEM
Figure 5 shows the consumed energy in Egypt for
2008/2009. The general lighting consumes 6.2 % of the total
GWhr in Egypt [7]. By other word, the required energy for
general lighting in Egypt is 6982 GWhr in this year.
Two simple proposed ideas can be discussed here. The first
is just simply using LED lighting only. This enables the 80W
LED lamp to replace the 150 W HPS lamp gaining the low
consumption for the same lighting intensity, so an energy
reduction by 46.67 % of the total power consumed by lighting
sources. Using LED lamps requires only 3724 GWhr per year.
Thus saving in power reaches approximately to 3258 GWhr.
The amount of equivalent fuel consumption related to the
6982 GWhr is 1519 thousand ton mazot. This charges 276.3
million L.E. Moreover, by replacing this proposed system, the
daily load demand curve will change as shown in Fig. 6. The
lighting loads will work for approximately 10hours from about
7:00 PM to 4:00 AM. The maximum load demand occurs
during 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM [7]. The maximum load demand
which was found to be 21330 MW before using the proposed
system will decrease to be 19391 MW. This is a very big step
in improving the load demand situation in Egypt.
The second step is to use the remote PV-LED system which
will compensate for the general light energy totally and get the
required amount for LEDs through the PV system. This will
save for the load demand the total 6.2% as shown in Fig. 6.
III. THE PROPOSED SYSTEM OPERATIONAL MODES
Figure 7 shows the schematic circuit diagram of the
proposed PCS which operates to charge the battery at day time
and also to power the LED lamp at night time. The proposed
control loop has implemented using only one microcontroller
which will control the charge and discharge phases. It is worth
noting here that during charging period, the control should
extract the Maximum Power Point (MPPT) from the PV
system. This is done by MPPT control algorithm implemented
inside the microcontroller. The LED brightness is dependent
on its current, so a LED current control algorithm is also
employed on the microcontroller. Figure 8 shows the proposed
power stage for driving the system of the standalone street
LED lamp light. The proposed system is 76 Watt street LED
lamp light. It consists of as mentioned before from the PV
panel with rating values of 85 Watt at 17 V and 5 A short
circuit current ratings, storage battery system with voltage of
24 V, PCS, and LED lamp. Figures 9 and 10 show the day and
night time operation modes of the system, respectively.
During the day time, the lamp is disconnected and the derived
system is shown in Fig. 9 where the PV panel is connected to
the battery for charging it. So switches Q4 and Q5 are on the
OFF state while switch Q1 is on the ON state. The two
switches Q2 and Q3 are synchronously switched with Pulse
Width Modulation (PWM) signal. Switch Q2 with the coil and
the switch Q3 are forming a simple boost converter system.
This is because of the PV panel voltage supposes to be smaller
than the battery voltage. The switching signals of this mode
are shown in Fig. 11. During the night time, the operation is
reversed. Switch Q1 should be in the OFF state, since there is
no sunlight and thus operation is unnecessary. But switch Q3 is
turned on and switches Q4 and Q5 are operated synchronously
with PWM. Switches Q2 and Q3 with the coil and the capacitor
Co are forming a simple boost converter system. This is
because the load voltage (LED Lamp) is larger than the
battery voltage.
 Fig. 11: The switching signals of switches.

Fig. 7: The schematic circuit diagram of the proposed system.

Q1 L2 Q3

PV Battery
Q5 Q2
Array Cb Model

Q4

Fig. 12: LED module array used in street lightening.

LED Co
String
IV. COMPONENT DESIGN AND SELECTION
To study the feasibility of the proposed driver, a prototype
Fig. 8: The power stage components of the proposed street LED light system has been designed for a LED street lighting lamp of 80 W.
Comparing to high pressure sodium lamp, the LED street light
can save about 50% - 70% energy. Besides, the life span of
LED street lamp is 3 - 5 times to sodium lamps. For example,
the 30 W, 60 W, 100 W and 180 W LED street lights are good
solutions to replace the conventional 80 W, 150 W, 250 W and
160 W high pressure sodium lamps [8]. Because of low power
consumption, it is the best candidate light source of solar street
lights. This can be assured by the LED lamp driver that was
presented for street lighting system in [9] and [10] for
universal AC input. There are many LEDs that are forming the
Fig. 9: Mode 1day time Operation lamp because of the illumination produced by a single LED is
relatively weak. Therefore, it is necessary to increase the flux
by incorporating strings of LEDs of series and parallel
combinations into a module array in order to use them for
street illumination as shown in Fig. 12, [11]. The LED lamp
that will be used consists of 4 branches of 19 LEDs in series.
The LEDs are of the type cool white Cree XM LED driven at
400 mA. This type of LED lamp can give overall luminous
efficacy of 132 lm/W [12].
Batteries accumulate the energy created by the PV system
during the day time and store it to be used at night. Batteries
can discharge rapidly and yield more current that the charging
source can produce by itself. Battery capacity is listed in amp
hours at a given voltage. For our example of 76 Watt lamp a
Fig. 10: Mode 2 night time operation
50 Amp.Hr Li-battery is used. This can withstand for another
cloudy day where there is weak sunlight for charging. The
proposed system was simulated using PSIM software. The
BP485 85 W PV module is proposed to be used with this
system [13]. The electrical characteristics of the used PV
module are shown in Table 1.
microcontroller. The LED current is received by the
microcontroller then compared with a preset value. The switch
duty cycles can be increased or decreased based on this
comparison to attain constant LED current and thus constant
illumination.

Table 1: Electrical characteristics of BP 485 Solar cell module

Electrical characteristics BP 485

Maximum power Pmax 85 W
Voltage at maximum power 17.8 V
Current at maximum power 4.9 A
Warranted minimum Pmax 80.75 W
Short circuit current 5.4 A
Open circuit voltage 22.0 V

Fig. 13: Plot of power versus voltage for the simulated PV.
V. THE EFFECT OF SHADING AND DUST
One of the best features in Egypt is the dry weather that
enhances the widespread of using PV systems in electrical
power generation. As mentioned in the previous section, the
selected 50 Amp.Hr Li-battery can withstand for another
cloudy day where there is weak sunlight for charging. Also,
the special MPPT algorithm proposed previously in [14] can
be used for cloudy and partially shaded places. It represents a
simple Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) tracking
technique for partially shaded PV using two stages of the
conventional perturb and observe method (P&O). The first
stage searches the I-V characteristic of the PV arrays by
scanning the whole range to detect the actual MPP using a
P&O with large value of step. The second stage and after
knowing the point of the actual MPP, applies the conventional
P&O method to oscillate around it but with very small step
that to provide very little oscillation with a higher efficiency.
Figure 13 shows the characteristic output power curve for
the solar cell from simulation under a given temperature and
irradiance. MPPT control has been used and implemented for Fig. 14: Flowchart of the P&O algorithm.
extracting the maximum power from the PV cell. The classic
P&O algorithm is pretty simple [15] - [16]. Figure 14 depicts a
flow chart explaining it. It operates by perturbing the PV array Figure 16 shows the current of the PV module due to the
voltage (i.e. incrementing or decreasing) and comparing the sunlight during the day time. The PV current is about 5 A. The
PV output power with that of the previous perturbation cycle. power generated by this current is used to charge the battery
If the perturbation leads to an increase (decrease) in array through the boost converter. The charging current of the
power, the subsequent perturbation is made in the same battery is shown in Fig. 17, where the constant current
(opposite) direction. In this manner, the peak power is tracked technique is used in this example to charge it. The battery
continuously. current is about -2.5 A. During the night time, the battery
discharges through the boost converter to the LED lamp
VI. SIMULATION RESULTS module. The discharging current of the battery is shown in
Fig. 18. The LED lamp light intensity is strongly dependent on
The proposed system has been simulated using PSIM
its current so a controller must be used to control the LED
software to verify the performance of the proposed idea using
current. Figure 19 shows the waveform of the LED current.
the designed component values. Figure 15 shows the flowchart
The simulation results of the PV charging the battery is shown
of the control algorithm that is implemented through the
in Fig. 20. The PV output is 17 V with the perturbations
occurred by the MPPT algorithm as shown by the top part of
the figure. Then the use of PCS consisting of the boost
converter is to charge the battery. The battery voltage during
charging stage is shown in the bottom part of the figure.

Fig. 18: The discharging current of the battery during night time.

Fig. 19: The LED lamp current

PV Output
30

25

20

15

Fig. 15 The flowchart of the control algorithm of the microcontroller. 10

0
Battery charging voltage
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1
Time (s)

Fig. 20: The PV output voltage and the battery charging voltage during
day time.

Fig. 16: The PV current to charge the battery

VII. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
A laboratory prototype for the proposed system has been
built and experimentally tested. Figure 21 shows the
experimental setup. The MPPT algorithm was implemented
with a low cost microcontroller. The MPPT algorithm which
is described in the flow chart shown in Fig. 14 has been
employed. Figure 22 shows the PV maximum output current
and voltage and maximum power, respectively. The maximum
power, Pmax is found approximately 80 W which is the product
of the Vpvmax and Ipvmax. This value means that the algorithm
oscillates around the actual MPP.
Fig. 17: The charging current of the battery during day time

Fig. 21: The experimental setup.
Fig. 22: The PV maximum output voltage, current and corresponding
maximum power.
VIII. PRIMARY FEASIBILITY STUDY
In this section, a primary feasibility study for the proposed
system. The general lighting absorbs 6982 GWhr per year
from utility. The equivalent cost of one kWhr is 0.412 L.E
(using electricity company site). Therefore, the cost of the
energy consumed by general lighting per year is equal to the
total absorbed GWhr times the cost of kWhr/1000. It gives
2880 million L.E.
On the other hand, installing LED –PV system requires the
cost of the PV panels, LED, inverter and controller. The
proposed PV-LED requires 3742 GWhr. Then, the total power
required at instant of PV-LED system equals the total energy
required by the time of operation = (3742*109 /(12*30*10))=
1.04 MW. The LED lifetime is (100,000 operating hours) that
equal to 27.8 years. The PV lifetime is 20 years. Battery
lifetime 10 years, using 2 sets in 20 years. Then, the
approximated LED-PV cost = 3$/W (1$=5.5 L.E)
Cost of the total required system equals: 1.04*109*3*5.5=
17.16*109 L.E. This cost is divided by the lifetime of the
system which is approximately 20 years. Then, the cost per
year equals 17.16*109 /20 = 860 million L.E. This cost is 30%
of the regular lighting cost. This primary calculation results in
how are the gaining advantages of the proposed system.
IX. CONCLUSION
In this paper a low cost high efficiency standalone solar
street LED light system has been proposed. The proposed
system conserves power by two ways, the source and the load.
The source is a PV array that is a clean renewable energy.
Also, a single microcontroller system has been proposed for
the power management of the system. The load is a LED street
lighting module that is energy saving system of illumination
and with a long lifetime that exceeds 7 times of the currently
used lamps. The 80 W LED lamp is used which equivalent to
150W of HPS sodium lamp. The proposed system introduces a
solution for the peak load problem of the Egyptian system. In
addition to, the feasibility cost is only 30% of the regular
system. In conclusion, the proposed idea is considered one
from the important solution for the future systems to solve the
world energy crises.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors gratefully thank the Egyptian Ministry of
Science and the Egyptian Science and Technology
Development funds (STDF) and the Spanish Ministerio de
Ciencia e Innovación under grant DPI2010-16481 for
supporting this project.
REFERENCES
[1] I. L. Azevedo, M.G. Morgan, F. Morgan, “The transition to solid state
lighting,” in the proceedings of the IEEE, 2009, Vol: 97 issue: 3 pp:
481-510.
[2] X. Long, R. Liao, J. Zhou, “Development of street lighting system-based
novel high brightness LED modules,” in the IET Optoelectronics, 2009,
pp: 40 - 4.
[3] Shur, M.S., Zukauskas, R., “Solid-State Lighting Toward Superior
Illumination,” in the proceedings of the IEEE, pp: 1691 - 1703, 2005.
[4] Ackermann, B., Schulz, V., Martiny, C., Hilgers, A., Zhu, X., “Control
of LEDs," in the proceeding of Industry Applications Conference, 2006.
[5] http://www.dimmer.de/shopping/artikelueber.php?sprachnrs=2&wgrupp
eid=296.
[6] http://www.solarstreetlights.net/.
[7] http://www.egelec.com/mysite1/default3.htm.
[8] http://www.ledlightsorient.com/street-lights-c-8.html.
[9] Mokhtar Ali, M. Orabi, Mahrous E .Ahmed, Abdelali El Aroudi,
“Microcontroller based modified SEPIC converter for driving LED lamp
with power factor correction,” IEEE International Conference on Power
and Energy PECON 2010, Nov 2010.
[10] Mokhtar Ali, M. Orabi, Mahrous E .Ahmed, Abdelali El Aroudi “Design
considerations of modified SEPIC converter for LED lamp driver,” in
the 2nd International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed
Generation PEDG 2010, June 2010.
[11] Y. Aoyama, T. Yachi, “An LED module array system designed for
streetlight use,” Energy 2030 Conference, 2009, pp. 1 - 5.
[12] http://www.cree.com/Products/pdf/XLampXP-G.pdf
[13] www.solarcellsales.com/techinfo/docs/bp-485.pdf.
[14] Hamdy Radwan, Omar Abdel Rahim, Mahrous E .Ahmed and Mohamed
Orabi; “Two stages maximum power Point tracking algorithm for PV
systems operating under partially shaded conditions,” Fourteenth
International Middle East Power Systems Conference, MEPCON 2010.
[15] Hua C., Lin J., Chen C., “Implementation of a DSP controlled
photovoltaic system with peak power tracking,” IEEE Trans. Industrial
electronics, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 99–107, Feb. 1998.
[16] Fernia N., Petrone G., Spagnuolo G., Vitelli M., “Optimization of
perturb and observe maximum power point tracking method,” IEEE
Trans. Power Electron., vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 963–973, Jul. 2005.