Low cost off-grid solar PV and led lightning system

Worldwide, one and a half billion people lack electricity, most of them rural dwellers. An 85 percent of rural regions in Africa have no access to electricity, such as more than 100 million people in Latin America. Despite of the recent developments in solar energy, its decreasing costs and some other technologies, there is still a huge amount of people without this basic service. As a simple, practical and cheap solution, a solar system was developed in Philippines to provide light in remote areas or very poor neighborhoods. This paper deals with the results obtained from the analysis and development of a renewed off-grid high-performance LED lighting system that allows underserved people to illuminate their homes at night in a safe and economical way without the need for a connection to the grid or fuels. The solar system in Philippines only allows the illumination during the day in closed spaces. It is called liter of light; it is worked by using a passive lighting system that utilizes the diffusion of the solar light into a plastic water bottle. The system proposed here, uses the energy generated by solar panels, and stores in batteries to power a set of HB-LEDs, which are immersed in water into a plastic bottle, complementing the previous system. This eliminates the heat sink in the system, because the water will act as a heat sink and as optics to distribute the light with an angle of approximately 330 degrees, thereby preventing the use of external optics for light distribution. Several components of configurations have been analyzed to obtain an optimal system performance in its the most basic configuration around 200 lumens, allowing low income people to improve their quality of life by having light in their homes overnight. It represents an inexpensive technological development of light with a free and infinite resource.