Green Options » solar lighting

Building Green With Solar Bricks

Shirley Siluk Gregory — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:53:08 +0000

What a great idea: incorporating solar energy not only into windows and roofs, but into the building blocks of structures themselves … as in bricks. The solar-powered brick, which has a solar cell embedded inside it, could be used to provide decorative or safety lighting, or even illuminate rural airplane runways, according to San Antonio-based distributor Sunrise Solar. Equally cool: you can order bricks that glow in any of a variety of colors.

Photo courtesy of Sunrise Solar Corp.

Portable Light

David Alan Foster — Mon, 19 May 2008 14:06:40 +0000

I went to visit a friend, Cameron Sinclair, who’s doing great work through his organization, Architecture for Humanity. One person he mentioned in our conversation was Sheila Kennedy and her project Portable Light. From the website:

“Portable Light is an interdisciplinary research, design and engineering project to create and implement new models for energy efficient electrical power and lighting. Portable Light applies creative processes and strategic integrative thinking to optimize existing semi-conductor technologies and create new applications to serve the large number of people—more than 2 billion—who do not have access to electric light or power. Portable Light is based upon the principle that global needs for technology development are inevitably interconnected. Knowledge, techniques, market solutions and data produced by the project benefit the “third” world and the “first” world where the need to imagine, design and develop energy efficient alternatives to the centralized and increasingly costly electrical grid is becoming ever more important.”

We’ll be keeping a close eye on LEDs, HBLEDs and OLEDs. Lots of design bandwidth in these lighting technologies.

How Solar Lighting is Revolutionizing African Communities

Sam Aola Ooko — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:19:23 +0000

The people of an impoverished southern African nation have everything to thank the Sun for; because a new revolution is sweeping across rural Malawi, lighting up village communities with cheap solar lamps that almost everybody is now able to afford.

The problem has been that access to modern electricity is but a privilege for the few who can afford it, and the majority are burning kerosene for lighting, a practice known to be expensive, dangerous and harmful to health.

An initiative run by Solar Aid, in partnership with the UK non-profit, TRAID, the project is geared toward protecting the environment and reducing poverty by introducing simple, locally assembled, affordable LED solar lanterns to the poorest communities, providing residents with a cheap alternative to kerosene while also generating employment opportunities for the underprivileged and ill.