To help out cities and utilities with appropriate lighting solutions, the Danish Outdoor Lighting Lab, or DOLL, opened a test facility in Denmark.
The DOLL living lab, located in Copenhagen includes latest designs in city street lighting. One of its primary goals is to help municipal officials, from Denmark, across Europe.
The opening ceremony display included lights shaped like rectangles, squares, circles and halos, with some emitting off cold white light, others warmer yellowish light and decorative lights giving off a show of psychadelic colors.
Some lights were powered by solar panels, others by tiny windmills in the lab. There were lamp posts with batteries and in addition some lights were connected to sensors that on judging presence of people lighted up powerfully, meant to save energy.
With cities around the globe are looking at upgrading street lighting to save money and cut greenhouse-gas emissions, it’s important that local officials understand their choices, says, Flemming Madsen, director, DOLL.
DOLL is a consortium of three partners: the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), the municipality of Albertslund and Gate 21, a partnership between local authorities, private companies and research institutions.
One DOLL facility is a quality lab, where lighting quality and performance of LEDs can be measured in photonics research environments. Based on the tests, clients can verify the LED innovations and lighting companies can get a stamp of approval on their product.
The second facility is a virtual lab, where lighting manufacturers and customers can use 3-D animations to act out how different lighting solutions would work in different environments, for testing different technologies. In future, this service can be availed by using a remote.
The new outdoor living lab in Albertslund is the largest facility of its kind in Europe, which focuses on offering enterprises an opportunity to be equal to branded ones and show the products under conditions.
The living lab is also self-assured to test smart city applications that implement street lighting infrastructure. All lamp posts in the outdoor lab are connected to a central network wired by Cisco. From a control room in the high-rise building, customers can test any lighting options test the vendors are willing to showcase.
In future, the lamp posts will gather and transmit data on UV radiation from the sun, acoustic qualities and noise, humidity, temperature, traffic and air pollution, hopes DOLL officials.
In general, customers do not prefer very advanced solutions with solar cells or windmills running the light. Municipalities want to get low-cost solutions that work now and cost little, but with the minimum budgets they find usually cost-saving LED lights and dimming attractive.
In Albertslund, the lighting lab will accomplish a goal of providing employment opportunity to the locals.
Albertslund can attract lighting researchers, as well as branch offices and create more jobs. The center can become a business destination for vendors and buyers to test and see different new lighting solutions in one place, explained, Mayor Christiansen.
Copenhagen is planning to replace 20,000 street lights with LEDs as part of the city’s goal to become the first carbon-neutral world capital by 2025. Albertslund plans to replace some 8,000 street lights over the next 10 to 15 years.
Albertslund is known as a pioneer on green solutions, who recently won an award for energy-efficient retrofits of existing housing. In a couple of weeks, Albertslund and Copenhagen will host a major international lighting conference.