Efficient Street Lighting

Over the years, street light­ing expense in Beth­le­hem has become a grow­ing bur­den on the local author­i­ties, even though part of it is direct­ly paid by the res­i­dents. Espe­cial­ly dur­ing Christ­mas peri­od, the cost of street light­ing reach­es $40,000 month­ly. Addi­tion­al­ly, the con­di­tion of the street light­ing net­works needs con­tin­u­ous main­te­nance often requir­ing new parts.

These facts drove BDF to pro­mote effi­cient street light­ing efforts with solar ener­gy. Start­ing with the main streets of Beth­le­hem Gov­er­norate, a needs assess­ment study was car­ried out by BDF to iden­ti­fy the need­ed elec­tric­i­ty to light 28 kilo­me­ters of main and rur­al streets.

The study iden­ti­fied the need for work­ing on three lev­els in par­al­lel. The first one is to design and install the need­ed PV solar farms, the sec­ond is to replace sodi­um lamps with high con­sump­tion of ener­gy with LED lamps and last to install new light­ing poles as needed.

A project pro­pos­al was devel­oped and sub­mit­ted to the Arab Fund for Eco­nom­ic and Social Devel­op­ment (AFESD), and in August 2020 AFESD approved to fund the first phase of the project.

BDF agreed with the munic­i­pal­i­ties of Beth­le­hem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahour to pri­or­i­tize the streets that need light­ing accord­ing to its touris­tic impor­tance and to the cur­rent con­di­tion of the exist­ing light­ing net­work. Pri­or­i­ty was giv­en to the his­tor­i­cal core area of each city.

By Ahmad Hif­nawi — BDF Devel­op­ment Coordinator