Energy reliability and feasibility analysis for battery-constrained off-grid solar street lighting: an uncertainty-aware dimming control framework

Chouikh, Salaheddine and Elmitwally, Nouh and Saeed, Faisal (2026) Energy reliability and feasibility analysis for battery-constrained off-grid solar street lighting: an uncertainty-aware dimming control framework. Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments, 93. p. 105315. ISSN 2213-1388

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Abstract

Off grid solar street lighting serves millions of people in energy-scarce communities where grid access is unavailable, yet battery aging and uncertain nightly discharge endurance make reliable service difficult to guarantee. Strict blackout budgets can be physically unattainable under minimum comfort floor constraints, a feasibility limit that existing control frameworks do not explicitly diagnose. We present a simulation-based benchmarking framework that links cycle-level battery discharge forecasting to phase-specific brightness control, and introduces two contributions to the energy reliability analysis of off grid lighting systems: (i) comfort-floor feasibility bounds that distinguish physically infeasible blackout targets from controller shortcomings, and (ii) blackout severity evaluation via unmet minutes conditional on blackout (UM|BO p90), which exposes tail-risk differences invisible to frequency-only metrics. Forecast uncertainty is handled through a model agnostic residual quantile safety buffer with battery-ID grouped splits to reduce leakage. Across repeated grouped battery splits, the floors-only feasibility estimate was 0.86% [95% CI: 0.00, 3.26] for H = 0.75 h, 6.06% [2.07, 10.04] for H = 1.0 h, and 26.47% [18.03, 34.91] for H = 1.5 h. Results are simulation-based benchmarks on NASA laboratory battery discharge data; field validation remains future work. Empirical coverage validation on held-out grouped test batteries confirmed that the residual-quantile buffer achieved 93.03% pooled empirical coverage (mean 91.61%, 95% CI: [88.69%, 94.53%] across 10 repeated runs) against a nominal 80% target, supporting its conservative empirical robustness properties.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number:	10.1016/j.seta.2026.105315
Dates:	Date Event 8 August 2026 Accepted 12 August 2026 Published Online
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Off grid solar street lighting, Dimming control, Battery aging, Uncertainty quantification, Residual quantile calibration, Feasibility analysis, Energy reliability, Coverage validation, Public lighting
Subjects:	CAH11 - computing > CAH11-01 - computing > CAH11-01-01 - computer science
Divisions:	Architecture, Built Environment, Computing and Engineering > Computer Science
Depositing User:	Gemma Tonks
Date Deposited:	24 Aug 2026 13:02
Last Modified:	24 Aug 2026 13:02
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/17181

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