Solar Powered IoT – enabling CO2 free IoT
The project aims to realize a multifunctional CO2 neutral solar-powered IoT integrated platform. Demonstrated and brought to market in innovative lighting products and scaled into other applications. By incorporating intelligence therein, both foundations are created to offer new services as well as make the solution CO2 neutral by being 100% solar powered.
orce Technology has developed an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) that enables IoT connection powered by solar cells under conditions of extremely small energy supply. The unit is unique in its nature and allows for a very low price point in a large scale. The solution has such low energy consumption that it can also be used indoors.
This project is developing and testing the solution through 3 case products that address the outdoor lighting market and thus incorporate intelligence therein. This ensures both lower energy consumption and at the same time incorporates additional functionalities, which can offer user’s additional services without adding CO2 emission based energy consumption.
Development within IoT technologies is growing rapidly and as early as 2022 50 billion units are expected to be connected to the internet and CISCO estimates this figure to be 500 billion by 2030. Although the individual product's energy consumption can be considered relatively small, it is a huge volume and a ticking CO2 bomb expanding the internet energy consumption that is currently, as CO2 polluting as air traffic and 500 billion IoT units with batteries is not going to do any good for our climate.
The solutions developed in the project offer CO2 neutral solar-powered IoT functionality without the need for battery, and with an ultra-low price that a chip solution enables.
In the project, a solar-powered IoT platform has been successfully developed and demonstrated in 4 case products. A small solar-powered sensor node based on Presto Engineering's Finlaggan ASIC that enables the placement of sensors in the project demonstrated by a motion sensor that connects to the LoRa network and can thus activate the desired functionality based on this or simply send data. Nordic Firefly has developed and demonstrated solar-powered lighting control platforms that have been implemented in 2 of Out-Sider's products (BIKE-SUN and JELLO), and 2 in its own lighting fixtures (Quark and Rescue ladder). The light control is based on extremely efficient energy conversion from solar cell to battery/supercap during the day, and from battery to light at night, which is crucial for solar cell operation of the entire lighting fixture. The project also implemented an IoT module that enables communication via LoRa via a developed server platform that, for demonstration purposes, has connected all the lamps in the project and enabled activation of the Finlaggan solution with a motion sensor. Challenges with antenna signal strength in the products have been identified in the project, and a solution has been developed for this, where the solar panel is made to function as a multifunctional component that both harvests energy from the sun and communicates with the cloud by an integrated antenna tailored for the LoRaWAN communication frequency.
After the project, Nordic Firefly and Finlaggan will pursue sales of the two developed solarpowered IoT solutions, just as Nordic Firefly and outsider will pursue sales of the solarpowered luminaires with integrated IoT, which have been used as demonstrators in the project.
The lighting solutions are 100% powered by solar energy, and are therefore neutral in terms of consumption in relation to the electricity grid.
In Denmark, there are about 1.5-1.7 million outdoor lighting points of which 20% is on traffic roads and 80% are in residential areas being the major target for this project. The residential area is divided in 70% streetlights and 30% park lights. The volume of park light luminaires addressable to the project are therefore about 0.4 million. For every bollard there are 10 park lamps further segmenting the market. Since both solar powered bollards and park lamps are developed in this project both segments are fully available and addressable. Historically more is invested on park lamps than in street lighting therefore being of lower quality. There is a trend towards using the park luminaire also as street lighting in residential areas giving a total addressable market of 80% of the light points in Denmark.
This project will be a launching pad towards more solar-powered outdoor lighting. In absolute figures, 382 GWh was used for street and road lighting in 2009 (1.2% of all electricity consumption in Denmark). The tendency to minimize light pollution is spreading both in Denmark and globally, and here standards have been identified through the International Dark Sky Association, which significantly reduce both the light and the light time, just as there are requirements for sensor control. All exactly what the solar-powered IoT solutions developed in this project make possible.
The traffic roads are more powerful and therefore energy consuming and therefore the solar powered solutions can address around 150-200 GWh of the energy spend for street lighting turning them into solar powered solutions.
Internationally there are around 326 million street lights which is expected to grow to 361 million in 2029. If the same ratio is used as in Denmark between street lighting and park luminaries - the total addressable international market volume is 100 millions in round numbers with a potential for the technology to bring around 25 TWh pr. year into a solar powered autonomous lighting solution off grid solution. Due to the current aggressively rising energy prices, the solar powered solution is becoming even more relevant as it completely take away the cost of electricity for powering the luminaire.
Key figures
Category
Participants
| Partner | Subsidy | Auto financing |
|---|---|---|
| Nordic Firefly A/S | ||
| Presto Engineering Denmark | ||
| Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (DTU) |
