T. Patrick Walsh and Anish Thakkar are on a mission to end the world health risks posed by kerosene lamps. Kerosene lamps cause burns, fires, produce smoke and particulate into the air that can damage lungs and eyes. Thakkar cited a study that says women in kerosene lanterns are nine times more likely to contract tuberculosis than homes using solar lights.
Their solution to the problem of kerosene lamps is solar lighting. This video shows Walsh discussing the Sun King lantern’s journey from student project to consumer product. After working on a generator in an Indian village he realized that there are an additional 200,000 villages in India and more than half of them need light. Additionally there are at least 1.5 billion people in the world relying on kerosene lamps for light.
According to Greenlight Planet’s website 75% of homes with the solar lighting were able to increase study time, 25% increased income, and 84% of users felt their air quality was improved. Expansion began with a move to supply lanterns to Africa, focusing on Kenya and Nairobi. An estimated 5,000 new homes were using the product every day in 2015, and projections were for the solar lanterns to be in 20,000,000 homes by the end of 2016. Anish says that these homes might never be on the electric grid the way that we perceive electricity, but every home can use light.
The lithium ferro phosphate batteries inside the lamps need to be changed on an estimated five year cycle, and in sunny conditions five hours of exposure will fully charge the battery. Polycrystalline solar panels on the smallest model are 350 milliWatts, and the largest systems use a 12 Watt panel.
Greenlight Planet is definitely a business enterprise but it’s great to see a company using social engineering as its driving force of innovation and product development. We have written about kerosene lamp replacement before here at ENGINEERING.com, and look forward to finding more engineers offering novel solutions to the problems of kerosene lamps and off grid lighting. This video tells the story of the company’s development through the VentureWell program, and Anish Thakkar also gave a great talk about the company to Nike’s The Girl Effect Accelerator in 2015.