Shushan Village in the Suzhou Hi-tech Park in east China's
Jiangsu Province is doing its bit for energy conservation by
installing solar-powered street lamps.
About 50 of the strange-looking lights, which feature an upward
facing "wing" that captures sunlight and turns it into energy,
appeared on the village's roads recently. They each use a 65-watt
energy-saving tube.
Cui Rongqiang, a solar energy expert from Shanghai Jiaotong
University, told China Daily: "There are two main reasons
for using the solar lamps: One is that solar energy is clean; the
other is that in the long run, solar lamps cost less and save more
energy than ordinary lamps."
Solar-powered traffic lights in
Suzhou
The solar panels collect sunlight and turn it into electricity,
which is then stored in cells for later use. No additional power
source is required.
Although the new solar lamps cost about 40-50 percent more than
ordinary lamps, they are cost-effective in the long run, as they
need little maintenance, require no cabling and have a longer
life.
Statistics from the photovoltaic engineering research centre
under the Ministry of Education show that 50 million new outdoor
lamps are installed each year. If just 50,000 (or one
one-thousandth) of them were the solar type, China would save 700
million kilowatt-hours of electricity every year equivalent to the
annual output of a 100-megawatt power plant.
As well as Suzhou, the energy-saving lighting has been
introduced in Beijing, Shanghai, Jinan in Shandong Province,
Taiyuan in Shanxi Province, and several other cities.
In February, 98 high-power solar lamps were installed along
Cangfeng Road in Shanghai's suburban Songjiang District.
As the energy-saving lamps become more popular, however, more
attention must be paid to their design and quality, Cui said.
He said that in some places, the lamps had stopped working after
just one year.
"There is still a long way to go before solar lamps are widely
applied in China and fulfill their energy-saving potential," Cui
said.
(China Daily April 19, 2007)
