At West, Streetlights Have Gone Wireless

The Culver City campus is the first in the District to install off-the-grid light poles that are powered by a solar panel wrapping and a battery.

A drive down College Boulevard at West Los Angeles College offers a view into the future.

It doesn’t appear as if there’s much to see, just wild brush bordering walkways on either side, oil derricks stretching to the nearby hills and the campus buildings at the end of the road.

So what makes this street, expected to open soon, unique?

The 38 light poles, installed three months ago along the curb, along with half a dozen in a parking lot near the athletic stadium, are the latest innovation in the Los Angeles Community College’s Sustainable Building Program.

Other aspects of the program’s commitment to energy efficiency are far more visible -- from rooftop solar panels to drought-resistant plants. But these no-strings-attached poles, operating without wires or any connection to the electrical grid, are an effective tool in the District’s ongoing sustainability effort.

While they may not appear to be any different than other light poles on this campus or the eight others in the District, they contain solar panels that are the same color as the poles around which they are wrapped. The panels capture sunlight and feed it to a battery in the base of the pole.

“In the past,” said Allan Hansen, the college's director of facilities, “no matter what type of street lights you were talking about, it always involved wires and the delivering of power from somewhere else. Now we can use the energy of the sun.”

What happens on cloudy days when the sun doesn’t appear?

“One day of sunshine will power the battery for five days,” Hansen said. “Southern California doesn't generally have five days of overcast. We usually get a break in between. And even when we have cloudy days, that doesn’t mean the solar panels aren’t working. They just aren’t working as efficiently.”

The battery powers diodes that beam down from the top of the pole to the street 30 feet below.

Also at the top are light sensors that guarantee an energy efficient use of the pole. They operate like occupancy sensors in a room.

“When there is nobody on the street,” Hansen said, “the light will dim down to where it’s almost like moonlight. When a car or a pedestrian approaches, the sensors detect it and brighten.”

Any size object elicits the same degree of illumination so a single pedestrian will get as much light as a bus or truck.

Each new pole costs $7,000, which includes the solar panels, good for about 25 years, and the batteries, which last four to five years.

That is less costly than the current poles, according to Hansen, when factoring in materials and labor needed to install the wiring and the $850-a-month electricity bill for lighting the West Los Angeles campus.

There is one additional cost benefit with the new poles. When the lights go out in the old ones, a cherry-picker crane and two men are required to change the bulbs. When the batteries go out, one man with a screwdriver can make the switch.

“We are the pioneer,” said Hansen,“the guinea pig, the first one among the community colleges to give this a try. With the bond program, you have thousands of vendors pouring in the door pushing their products and, once in awhile, you get somebody with an interesting idea.”

“We are willing to try things,” said Steven Jacobson, design manager for Turner Construction Company, production manager for West Los Angeles College.

“When I was first told about it, I had my doubts,” Hansen admitted. “It actually works better than I thought. What I doubted was not the solar or battery concept, because those are pretty well proven in other products. But the LED (light-emitting diodes) technology, in my opinion, is just not 100% there yet. It’s getting closer. Diodes are just not very bright and are directional, so it takes a lot of them to get the kind of power and the broad spectrum you want.

“But what we have is very impressive.”