Ecological Sustainability of Fiber Optic Solar Lighting in the Future of the State of Qatar

The use of electric lighting in our homes and our workplaces stands for a significant portion of the society’s electric energy consumption. Furthermore, generating such electricity leads to the production of greenhouse gases. At the same time as the electricity is coming through our lamps inside our houses, an overflow of light is flowing down from the sky and hits the exterior of the same houses. At almost any day of the year, the daylight is superior in both the illumination level and quality compared to the artificial light we are using for our everyday tasks. A technology capable of collecting this abundant sunlight and distributing it, via optical fibers, into the interior of a building will be of great benefit. Sunlight is an abundant and infinite source of energy that is being underutilized in Qatar. The state’s climate is sunny most of the year, with temperatures ranging from 12°C to 48°C, and thus the solar source of energy is abundant. Therefore, it is of an economical benefit for the state to harvest and utilize this energy source in every way possible. In Qatar, a large part of electricity is used for indoor lighting during daytime, accounting for 10% of the total electric energy required for buildings. In many facilities, this percentage is even higher. For example, illumination in an office space of 400 m² accounts for approximately 40% of the total energy consumption of the space. In fact, Qatar is recognized amongst the world’s largest consumers of energy per capita. According to the United Nations Statistic Division, relative to the size of Qatar’s economy, the country on a whole uses twice the amount of energy as the nations of Germany or Japan. As a partial remedy to reduce the consumption of electrical energy, Qatar can take advantage of its sunny climate, and thus it is possible to collect and focus sunlight on optic-fiber cables that transfer the light to indoor rooms, buildings and stores. In the present work, we wanted to cast some light on fiber optic daylighting and its potential use in a very sunny and relatively hot environment, such as that in Qatar. The main goal of this project was to explore the use of a lighting system based on fiber optics as the main light source.