Lumiweave smart fabric is meant to provide shade and inexpensive lighting for urban spaces. Photos: Anai Green

The Israeli city of Tel Aviv-Jaffa is piloting a new street fabric that provides both daytime shade and light at night without the need for electricity.

The eco-friendly system, called Lumiweave, is an outdoor fabric embedded with solar and organic photovoltaic (PV) cells that store solar energy during daytime hours for off-grid lighting in the evening. The fabric consists of polymer strips with LED lights that receive energy from the PV cells.

Created by product designer Anai Green, the system can withstand all weather conditions and will continue to provide lighting even after three days without sun. According to Green, the Lumiweave system saves at least 50 percent of the cost of installing the infrastructure of standard lighting and 100 percent of electricity costs. Users can also control the timing and intensity of lighting.

“There are no carbon emissions at all,” Green says, “We use it to light public space without spreading light pollution, because the light is under a canopy. We spread light in the area we want to light only.”

Green was a winner of the Women4Climate Tech Challenge in 2020. 



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