ORNL Engineer Dave Beshears
A technology collecting sunlight connected to special indoor light fixtures has earned an Excellence in Technology Transfer Award. The award was presented recently to representatives of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The hybrid lighting technology uses a rooftop-mounted 48-inch diameter collector and secondary mirror that track the sun throughout the day. The collector system focuses the sunlight into 127 optical fibers connected to special light fixtures equipped with diffusion rods similar to fluorescent light bulbs. The rods spread light in all directions.
One collector currently powers eight to 10 hybrid light fixtures that can illuminate about 1,000 square feet of space. During times of little or no sunlight, a sensor controls the intensity of fluorescent lamps to maintain a constant level of illumination.
The system is estimated to save about 6,000 kilowatt hours per year in lighting and another 2,000 kilowatt hours in reduced cooling needs for a total savings of 8,000 kilowatt hours per year.
This is such a natural for my part of the country. We have 300+ days of clear skies. There are northern tier states up in that class, too.
Nice to see this is moving towards production. We posted about this technology, last August.
very cool indeed
Wow natural hue lighting for the home….awesome.
I live in the same State as Dvorák and it just drives me nuts that you don’t see solar panels all over the place.
Piping natural sunlight in through fiber is not new. It’s been done for several years now. Integrating it with flourecent lighting IS new. Very nice…
// If you look closely, you see parts of FSM’s follicles lighting up.
Not for the home. For businesses.
I honestly won’t tear-up my drywall to install something to save me 50$ per year.
However my office ceiling is tiles, then the cement roof. Easy!
Setting up mirrors in all four corners towards the center collector. No moving parts. Mirrors are cheap.
Retrofitting most homes and businesses might be too much for the current returns. New construction, however, should make many new technologies standard. When the cost has dropped enough then retrofitting might become worthwhile.
What’s funny, I remember seeing something like this demonstrated on a discovery channel show years ago. It seems like the technology was being used in a few office buildings. At the time it was merely being touted as a way to provide more natural lighting to workers fed-up with fluorescent bulbs.
Guess there is something to be said about the right place and the right time.
Waitaminute! This guy got an award for what we have been doing with windows for centuries. I guess I should invent the solar powered door.
The japanese already did that YEARS ago.
wow! 8000 KW hours is a lot. just imagine if all the countries in the world start doing this. Our planet would be super cool then