The Power of Light
As the world struggles with the rising cost of energy and the urgency to move to more sustainable sources of power, at Foresolutions we’re extremely excited and proud to be working with Lightricity, an innovative business focused on harvesting light to generate electricity.
Everlasting Sustainable Power
Lightricity enables the wide scale deployment of IoT sensors and trackers without the need to install, replace or recharge batteries, and therefore avoiding the production, maintenance and environmental costs associated with traditional battery-operated devices.
The Lightricity technology has been specifically developed to use indoor lights, and is up to 6x more efficient than other light harvesting technologies. Originally developed in 2012 at Sharp Laboratories in Oxford, Lightricity Ltd was founded in 2017 to further develop and commercialise its world-leading energy harvesting technology. The team has developed the world’s first photovoltaic energy harvester for indoor light environments.
Commercialisation
In 2021, Lightricity was one of the 19 cutting-edge projects that received £27 million government funding under Innovate UK's Sustainable Innovation Fund (SIF).
The funding from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, enabled the accelerated demonstration of Lightricity’s high-efficiency energy harvesting technology in real-world healthcare and logistics environments.
Eliminating the need for batteries will make IoT sensors of all types more sustainable and scalable, enabling large scale applications in the public and private sector. Read more about the scheme here.
Full details about the Lightricity story can be found on their website.
IoT Use Cases
IoT is one of the main applications for Lightricity technology. By using light powered sensors, many commercial use cases can now be exploited without the environment impact, operational hassle and costs associated with battery replacement across a large estate:
Our Work With Lightricity
We’ve been working with Lightricity now over the last 12 months to help establish and trial real-life case studies of commercial opportunities in both the housing and food & drink retail sectors.
Food & Beverage Retail Example
We used Lightricity BLE sensors in a temperature tracking solution trial for a large coffee shop chain. The solution was intended to replace multiple manual checks on the company’s fridge temperatures throughout the day, allowing staff to carry on serving customers. The management team was also able to access real-time live data to help quickly identify any abnormalities across the sites and potentially avert costly stock wastage through inefficient storage.
Housing Association Example
We are also partnering with a UK Housing Association that has a range of use cases from air quality control, communal area temperature monitoring and lift maintenance that uses Lightricity sensors.
If you are interested in talking to us about how your business can become more sustainable by using light harvesting technology and IoT solutions we are your go to team. As an experienced IoT solutions designer and systems integrator, we can build a solution to your exact requirements, combining a range of use cases and connectivity routes to achieve your objective. Contact us for an initial consultation or read more about our IoT Accelerator to get your IoT project into proof-of-concept stage in days, not weeks or months.