Raise your hand if you knew that streetlamps accounted for 38 percent of all energy used on lighting in the USA. Very good, children! It’s true. And now, the Civil Twilight Design Collective has designed an award-winning light-aware streetlamp that would adjust its intensity based on the brightness of the moon. By using this technology and LEDs instead of the steam-age sodium bulbs we have so many of these days, we could reduce the energy consumption of our nighttime street-lighting solution by as much as 90 percent. It’ll probably be expensive as hell, but I say bring it on. Maybe now I’ll be able to see these “stars” everyone talks about.
Lunar Resonant Streetlights [Treehugger, via PSFK]
Well, a couple of observations:
I think that this should mandatory in neighborhoods where hurtling down the road at over, say, (let me pull a number outta my butt,) 40 isn’t likely to take place. And it would mitigate the problem of people not being able to fall asleep at night because of a street light right outside their window (!!).
I think that most streetlights in areas over the aforementioned 40 MPH should be converted to use solar power as a way to mitigate the cost of burning them solely using ‘the grid.’ I mean, how much power does it take to power a single light overnight? On the shortest day of the year? If you double that capacity (stuffing the rechargeable batteries/capacitors/fairy dust in the light pole itself,) it should be able to mitigate quite a bit of drain on the local area’s power needs.
And while I think it will be excruciatingly expensive to replace EVERY SINGLE streetlight, I would think it should pay for itself inside of a couple of decades.
Tell me what would be wrong with that idea..
Sounds sweet.