Monitoring the Performance of Solar Street Lights in Sahelian Environment: Case Study of Senegal

This paper presents an innovation in the maintenance of solar street lights in Senegal. On the one hand, there are currently 71000 solar street lights in Senegal and this number will continually increase thanks to the financing of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (also known by its French acronym, UEMOA). On the other hand, Senegal is situated in the Western part of Africa within the Sahelian region which is under dust influence all year long. According to recent studies the degradation of the power of the crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules due to the dust deposits is up to 68% in Senegal. In this context we propose a connected system for monitoring the performance of the solar street lights in Senegal. This paper presents the implemented solar street light at the fitness trail of the western corniche of Dakar which is selected as a pilot zone. The proposed solar street light is equipped with sensors and a transmission system for collecting the data in real time on a remote server. A Web server is deployed and the collected data can be viewed for monitoring purposes by designed users as the municipality staff which is responsible for the maintenance of the solar street lights. The use of these data, which is not taken into account in this paper, will allow better planning of the cleaning of the street light solar panel.