Times Square Billboard Goes Solar

Times Square has notched another first. The Ricoh Eco Board Times Square billboard, which measures more than 6,000 sq. ft., is powered by entirely by the sun.
Located at 3 Times Square, at the corner of 7th Ave. and 42nd St., the 47 x 126 ft. billboard is powered by 62 solar panels and 24 thin-film, photovoltaic solar modules, and illuminated by 16 LED floodlights.
Design constraints that were overcome included the sign’s curved surface and heavy windloads.
A special ceremony to celebrate the completion of the Eco Board will take place on June 8 in Times Square.
The Cooley Group (Pawtucket, RI) designs, develops and manufactures high-performance flexible composites used worldwide in such applications as outdoor advertising, environmental containment, fuel and water tanks, medical products, commercial roofing, signs and awnings.
Cooley, which has developed the Enviroflex printable billboard substrate, partnered with Ricoh Americas Corp. (West Caldwell, NJ), Takara Media (NYC), Lamar Advertising (Baton Rouge, LA) and Xunlight Corp. (Toledo, OH) to install this lightweight, solar-powered billboard system. Cooley’s proprietary, flexible-membrane technology is integrated with Xunlight’s thin-film, photovoltaic panels to create a solar-powered, electricity-producing system.
Jeff Flath, Cooley Group president, said, “As the evolution of TFPV (thin-film photovoltaic) technology advances, the integration with our flexible composites will make our products more affordable to a larger percentage of applications. We have been working on TFPV integration for the last several years and are now introducing systems for commercial roofing, outdoor advertising, and military tents.
Bryan Rose, VP of Cooley’s Commercial Graphics business, said, “These lightweight systems could be installed on some portion of the 450,000 billboards currently in the United States. Each of these billboards would generate clean renewable energy to either power the billboard lighting system or would be sold back to local utility companies through net metering or feed in tariffs programs.”
Dr. Xunming Deng, Xunlight’s president and CEO, said, "Xunlight is very excited about Cooley choosing Xunlight’s flexible, lightweight, environmentally friendly, thin-film, photovoltaic product.”
For more information, visit www.colleygroup.com to see a video.