Overview

In 2013, solartonic™ llc was awarded a grant by Next Energy, to develop and install solartonic’s new wave autonomous solar lighting solutions as a demonstration project on its campus, located in downtown Detroit, Michigan. The project was installed in Next Energy’s parking lot as well as along the main entrance pathway to their building.

solartonic™ was able to rapidly install the lamp standards with all its integrated lighting, controls, energy storage and solar harvesting components without the expense and disruption of digging up any asphalt and laying electrical cable. The resulting installation looks very attractive and serves as a visible and accessible showcase for solar lighting technology.

Reliability

solartonic’s solar lighting configurations are conceived to provide reliable power, especially during long, cold Michigan winter nights. On this site, with its location bordering buildings on three of its four sides with times of significant shading, the lighting system is expected to provide high levels of solar power under these demanding conditions. This is owing to solartonic’s uniquely configured omni-directional solar harvesting capability and ability to draw from diffuse sky radiation throughout the day, irrespective of weather conditions and shading aspects.

Integrated Systems

solartonic’s solarlume™ premium+ offers the highest performance solar lighting solutions. Integrated smart features provide fail-safe lighting and an expected 20 plus years system life for the key functions – lighting, energy storage and harvested energy.

The solutions adopted for the project include a type 5 luminaire for the pathway, and a type 2 luminaire for the parking lot. These are achieved by state of the art, high efficiency and name brand luminaires from Schreder (Alura) and Philips Gardco (Slenderform) respectively. The Alura light was provided by Ledos, a Michigan based lighting company, who originally designed the light engine for Schreder. The system integrates solarap™, solartonic’s high-efficiency, pole-wrapped solar modules with its custom designed lamp standards, solapole™ , to provide a slim-line aerodynamic solution with minimal EPA.

solartonic’s integrated power and lighting control center – smartadapt™ – communicates via a zigbee based mesh network, that allows the system to be set and monitored remotely, for various dimming and motion sensing profiles. Another controller continuously monitors system performance, that includes solar power generation, battery power performance and lighting power load.