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Almost no running costs ! Only the capital cost of installation, and a small amount of maintenance - just keeping the inputs and outputs clean. |
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It would make sense to pipe light from areas with a surplus of light - the Namib, Sahara, Gobi etc. through concentrators, and run a big, thick fibre to the destination where a splitter shares out the illumination to individual units. |
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For applications where lots of power are being routed,
fiber optics become saturated and instead the solution is
often something called a liquid light guide. Even they
start to get unwieldy in the kW range which is very much
low end for both sunlight and even the most modest of
urban lighting projects. If you want to move a lot of light,
and you don't really care about coherence, spectral shift
etc. then angled mirrors and straight lines are the way to
go. |
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Lets work through a pilot project to check feasibility.
Take the small community of Waitangi in the Chatham
islands <link>. As the community is small & remote the
electrical infrastructure is likely to be inefficient
diesel/lpg generators etc. likely reliant on ships to
resupply. Even at a large capital cost, I imagine the New
Zealand government would entertain a sustainable, low-
carbon solution to street lighting that would need almost
no maintenance. |
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For Waitangi, we will need a solar collector on the
opposite side of the globe (antipode) <link>. To account
for atmospheric, mirror & misalignment losses, I think
that covering a few hundred square km of Paris would do
the job nicely. Then, it's just an orbital mirror or two in
the appropriate orbits and the good citizens of Waitangi
can walk the streets at night in comfort. I can't see the
downside to this scheme. |
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In researching this study I stumbled upon the Chatham
Islands website <link> an absolute gem of an internet
fossil. |
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// covering a few hundred square km of Paris would do the job nicely // |
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Well, that could be done anyway, and then if it can also be used to provide lighting for Waitangi that would be a bonus. |
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Is Waitangi in dire need of high-contrast rat silhouettes? |
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If we just fibre optic-ed every inch of the planet to its antipode we'd become invisiball. |
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If you could find a way to make these
passive solar street lights dim in an annoying way
as people or cars approach them you could market
them as “passive aggressive solar street lights“ |
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Perhaps both ends could be on a long stick, with the
diffusers pointing up at one end during the day, and
down during the night.
This would halve the number of fibres needed and
mean that street lights would be "twinned" with ones
approx 12 hours away. |
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The fibres may not need to be as long as you think,
since you don't need to go half a world away - you
can stay at the same latitude, provided you are well
clear of the arctic/antarctic circle. |
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Possibly the idear of the yea. [+] |
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Nice idea to have 2-way fibres. Could there be a passive switch to flip the incoming/outgoing light? Probably not. |
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And I would think there could be some kind of optimisation algorithm about how long the fibers need to be. Especially if the lights don't need to be on all night but only sunset to midnight and 6am to sunrise (for example) |
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Watches pocmloc tooling around in gold Rolls-
Royce, from the gutter, remember me, your old
pall Nmrm... |
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All we need is three balloons about the size of the moon, and some small tubs to keep them in orbit. Of course the astronomers won't like it, but we can just give them some cameras on the dark side of the balloons to shut them up. |
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[nmrm] I will always keep coming back to where you are lying there in the gutter, as long as you still have that rag and the hubcaps still need polishing. Its a very useful service you provide. Cheap too! |
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