Philips’ Simplicity: The Light Blossom Concept

If you’ve been paying attention to the lighting industry lately, you would have noticed a trend to revolutionize and reinvent a concept that is so unbelievably important to everyone – street lighting and civil lighting projects.  From street lights that resonate with the intensity of the reflected light from the moon, to LED street lamps that have revolutionary shapes and infrastructure, to a lamp that is nearly the size of a Tic Tac and produces so much light without any electrodes that it’s almost unbelievable.

Philips has invented yet another street light/civil lighting concept that was revealed a few months ago called the Light Blossom.  This unique idea seems to stem from the fight against “light pollution,” and from Philips’ own mouth – Light Blossom is “a pole that harnesses renewable energy during the day, and shines only the necessary light at night.”

What makes this concept so unique is its ability to not only harvest light in several ways, but to also monitor how much light it outputs, with careful consideration being given to wasteful energy expenditure.  When the sun shines, the Light Blossom opens up, soaking in and collecting all of the available sunlight and storing it in the trunk of the fixture.  On cloudy, sunless, windy days – when the wind blows, the Light Blossom tilts its leaves up in a sort-of turbine position, spinning and generating energy that is also stored.  Light Blossom converts back and forth with the changes in the weather too, so as to not waste any opportunity to grab and store energy for the latter part of the day when it will be most needed.

Light Blossom runs at the minimum amount of illumination at night when no one is around – enough to maintain safety – and when people are present, Light Blossom provides comforting light for those around.  The best part of this is that Light Blossom requires a total of ZERO electricity from the grid.

Philips, I gotta say that is pretty damned cool.  Check out more about Light Blossom here.  Also, thanks to Flickr user “tuexperto” for his great Light Blossom photos.