We see increasing, what appear to be, solar panels on electric poles?
I work in NJ and we started seeing them around our industrial park. I think it's probably some scam for the most part. Each panel isn't going to put out more than a few volts. Because they are so widely distributed about the only thing they might be good for is lighting a sodium bulb or something. A much more effective use if it was a serious / more efficient/effectively designed project, we'd probably be seeing farms of panels going up all over the place and on the tops of big-box buildings, but I'm not seeing alot of that.
Solar powered street lights . They work really well but expensive
Usually they are used to power monitoring units that transmit data to a central point on usage and/or line loads. They may also be used to supply power to some control circuits, and to allow remote control of these units. (If there was no power in the line, how else could you supply the needed power to obtain information and/or control these things remotely.) What they do is keep a standby or backup battery charged to operate the equipment. They are also used for self-powered lights in many areas, charging batteries during the day to run the light(s) at night. Similar systems are used on monitoring wells to transmit water table data. (Faster, cheaper, and more timely than sending someone around to make checks and read equipment once every couple of months.)
Here is an article about this. They use the poles (which they already have) and install power panels, the electricity is given into the grid. There are companies in NJ which use google earth to find buildings with large roof tops (imagine all the warehouses !), contact them and lease the rooftops to install solar panels, there a different ways how to finance that (by them, by the company, ....) and they sell the electricity into the grid and receive a certain price for this. Usually the refinancing is 5 - 7 years of the investment, after this is profit for additional 5 - 20 years. Walmart had a project to put solar panels on the super centers ....
