If you’re planning to light a street, pathway, park, or parking lot, chances are you’ve asked, or been asked, the seemingly simple question: “What’s this going to cost?” The answer gets complicated fast, especially once you start comparing solar lighting to conventional grid-tied systems.
For a long time, solar had a reputation as the premium choice. Clean, forward-looking, and full of promise—but not necessarily the right choice for projects that simply needed reliable light at a fair price.
We’re here to tell you: things have changed. Over the past few decades, solar and battery technologies have gotten better and cheaper, while LEDs have slashed the energy required to produce light. Meanwhile, trenching, wiring, and electricity keep pushing the cost of conventional lighting in the other direction. The two are converging, and for a lot of projects, solar comes out cheaper and greener. Here’s how the numbers really break down.
Installation costs: where grid lighting gets expensive
Installing grid-connected lighting involves much more than setting poles and plugging in fixtures. In many projects, it requires extensive trenching: cutting into roads or sidewalks, digging through landscaping, laying down electrical cables or conduit, then restoring everything afterward.
Costs vary considerably by surface and location, but as a rough guide: bare earth trenching typically runs $5 to $12/linear foot, but cutting through harder surfaces like concrete push that to $15 to $30. Backfilling and restoration—resurfacing what you cut through—can add another $4 to $12/foot. Urban sites tend to run higher still, due to additional traffic control and permitting requirements.
Take a 150-lot residential development. At roughly one light every 150 feet, that’s 50 fixtures. If each needs 100–150 feet of trenching to reach the next, you’re looking at 5,000–7,500 feet of digging. At a midrange $30 per foot for trenching, wiring, and restoration, the below-ground work alone runs up to $225,000—before a single pole goes in.
Solar skips this step. Each system generates and stores its own power, so installation is just foundation, pole, mount, and commissioning (programming and switching the light on). There’s still work and cost, obviously, but it’s a far cry from that six-figure trenching bill.
Equipment costs: why solar is catching up
Historically, solar lighting systems did cost significantly more upfront than grid-tied fixtures. Today, many still do, but the gap has narrowed—and not by a little.
Solar panel costs have dropped significantly as technology has improved and manufacturing has scaled. Batteries have followed a similar path, with better energy density and more cost-effective chemistries. LEDs have also made lighting systems more efficient, allowing modern systems to deliver the same light output on a fraction of the power older systems needed.
That efficiency has a compounding effect: less power required means smaller batteries and panels, which means lighter systems that no longer need the ultra-durable (and ultra-expensive) poles and foundations solar once demanded. Our newest system, the EverGen 3, was designed around these improvements, delivering reliable performance in a leaner, faster-to-deploy system.
Operating costs: where solar keeps saving
Grid lighting doesn’t stop costing money once it’s installed. Electricity bills accumulate, rates rise, and the network itself needs upkeep: repairs for damaged cable, failed transformers, and the ever-popular copper wire theft.
Solar sidesteps both problems. There’s no electricity bill, because sunlight is free, and there’s no electrical network to maintain, because there isn’t one. Well-built systems need very little upkeep: batteries typically last 6–10 years, while panels and fixtures often run for 15 or more.
