Solar-powered streetlights wipe out AI climate impact


By Dr. Tim Sandle
SCIENCE EDITOR
DIGITAL JOURNAL
November 27, 2025


Street lighting. — Image by © Tim Sandle

The environmental impact of power-hungry AI data centres has been in the news, with governments scrabbling to generate more electricity. A British company, Conflow Power Group, has found a solution.

The firm has invented a solar-powered streetlight, iLamp, packed with Nvidia AI processors. No electricity supply is required and the owner actually makes a profit because AI providers such as OpenAI pay for the processing power. Hence, there is a near-zero carbon footprint and a profit for the customer.

The iLamps come with a 20-year warranty and the base model costs £7,500 but AI providers pay to use the Nvidia Jetson compute power for their services – meaning buyers can generate revenue instead of incurring running costs. They can also be fitted with almost any tech as required, including AI cameras, sensors, Wi-Fi and GPUs.

The technology provides a solution to a growing global AI power consumption crisis – reducing the carbon footprint to near-zero while supplying the world’s first autonomous AI distributed data centre.

Electricity consumption from AI data centres is estimated to be 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) and this is set to more than double by 2030 to around 945 TWh, according to the International Energy Agency, leading several nations to expand their nuclear power station programmes to cope.

A recent Cornell University study also found that by 2030, the current rate of AI growth in the US will add up to 44 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere – equivalent to adding 10 million petrol cars to the road. This underscores the urgency of accelerating the energy transition and point to the need for AI companies to harness clean energy potentials.

In addition, surging AI demand could also consume 1.7 trillion gallons of fresh water per year globally by 2027 to cool servers, according to an estimate from researchers at the University of California, Riverside.

The iLamp solves several of these problems, reducing the carbon footprint to near-zero since it is powered off-grid by low maintenance self-cleaning solar panels generating up to 200–600W of power, depending on configuration, while only consuming 80W. The surplus electricity can support a range of technology including Nvidia Jetson AI processors which only draw 15W per unit.

There are streetlights everywhere in our towns and cities. By replacing them with iLamps fitted with Nvidia Jetson processors, the firm suggests this will create a large distributed data centre which is clean, non-water-hungry and low latency because the servers are near to the users.