S4GA company has successfully executed Solar Airfield Ground Lighting delivery to military airbase located in North Africa. We worked with a local partner that bought equipment and performed the installation.
In 2015 S4GA has been contacted by a local African construction company planning to install airfield lighting at a military airbase. The customer considered conventional lighting, however, has very little experience in the area of airfield lighting.
The scope of work was: to illuminate a 3.000 m runway and parallel taxiway that was used by air forces as a secondary runway.
The airport was equipped with an old airfield lighting system that was partially vandalized and did not work properly. The solution was only to install a new AGL.
However, the main issue that made it almost impossible to use hard-wired runway lighting was the lack of a main electrical power supply as the airport is located in a desert.
An alternative solution for this airfield was either a diesel generator or solar airfield lighting. S4GA offered a solar LED airfield lighting system that requires neither electrical power supply nor other electrical circuit elements (CCRs, transformers, cables). In North Africa where the photovoltaic potential is one of the highest on the planet, S4GA solar AGL operates 365 days on solar energy.
Due to a lack of airside documentation – the S4GA project team had also prepared a complete runway lighting layout of the airbase. The project included designs of types and locations for guidance signs and horizontal markings for runway lighting and taxiway.
An offered solar system requires minimum maintenance – cleaning solar panels and changing batteries once in a few years – which is less than 1% of the AGL system’s total cost.
Complete project implementation lasted a few months. In case of a traditional wired system, it would take even years.
