Robert Llewellyn (previously of Red Dwarf fame) covered this idea eight years ago (July 2017) on his 'electrify' channel:
> The simple and very commonplace lamp post will soon become a ubiquitous charge point for electric cars. They charge at about 5 kW, or 16 amps, not super fast but overnight charging is all most drivers need. Ubitricity is a German based company who've come up with a simple, cheap to install and well managed system for more people on more streets to adopt electric cars.
They charge at about 5 kW, or 16 amps, not super fast
Our 14 year old Blink (no, not that one) Level 2 charger only does 5.8 kW, and it has served us fine for overnight charging even the 77 kWh battery in our current car.
16 amps is a typical ampacity rating for 2.5mm conductors. Authorities either have to upgrade their wiring or split current usage between the lighting fixture and the charger.
The wiring for many streetlights fates back to older lights that were sodium or halogen bulbs that were MUCH less power efficient. Most municipalities considering this technology will have swapped to LEDs. The theoretical carrying capacity of a light's wiring will be far beyond what the LED consumes.
What prevents "squatting" at a post (either with an EV or an ICE)?
Just thinking of my neighborhood (THs, not flats, but still no dedicated parking), there's a lamp every 4th or 5th home, and most households have ~2 cars. People mostly park in front of their house today - if you have an ICE, but also a lamppost, it's a negative - you no longer get use of the closest space (or, you take the EV spot from an EV).
The neighborhood solved this by allowing a charge cable to the spot closest to your house. But, that's expensive to install, so not many have done so (electrical panel on back of house, parking on front, so interior cable pull through finished space of home, charge unit on front exterior wall, then conduit through yard and public sidewalk for the cable run to parking). Of course, this doesn't help with apartment parking or true public street side parking (our neighborhood own the parking lot as a shared amenity).
The model I have seen is that there's a cost for charging as well as parking after charging has completed. You get 20 minutes after charging has ended for free but there will be a blocking fee afterwards as long as the cable is still connected to the car and will be charged as part of the charging fee. If someone charges their car and then disconnects the cable and blocks the spot, they will be towed as the spot has a notice that it's only for charging devices.
I have seen those attached to light posts here in Germany but they all are in front of public area, not private houses so I guess it's only for charging, not parking.
In another point, if it's in front of a private property and the owner plan to occupy it for themselves, it would not make sense to install charger there as even when the owner is not charging, no one else can use.
I'm not sure about these particular ones. But I've heard that some similar chargers can get a unique ID for your car through the charging cable and use that for billing.
It's interesting how this sounds like a cutting edge experiment, while this is a common thing to see in Germany and other European states for quite a while now.
I live in the UK; my postman walks up to my house and posts my letters through a flap in the door. I grew up in Australia, where our postman used to ride up to our letterbox on a postal-service-issued motorbike, because the suburban houses are too far apart to make walking economical.
The fact that putting EV chargers in lampposts works in Europe doesn't necessitate that doing so will work in the natural environment, built environment and cultural context of the US. They have to do their own assessments to work out the best solution to the same problem in a different context.
Well, if we are discussing the scenario where people live in tall buildings with no private parking available and need to park the car overnight on the street (which is the scenario depicted by the study)... It sounds a lot like your average European city.
> in many states it's legal for the contractor to drive from the passenger seat.
I doubt they're driving from the passenger seat. It's hard to reach the pedals from the passenger seat. Many mail delivery vehicles in the US are right hand drive; the driver's seat is on the right. I don't know that left hand drive is strictly required by any states, it's more a matter of there's not many models available for sale in the US with right hand drive as an option, and few people order them when available; and importing out of market RHD cars is a chore.
You can (or could) order some Jeeps in RHD, and a lot of rural USPS contractors have RHD minivans (many from the Japanese Domestic Market)
I did see a 'converted' RHD Windstar (Ford minivan) on FB Marketplace, where they removed the driver seat, put a flat platform in, and connected controls with cables and levers. That's an option too, I guess.
They do in the US too, but contractors use their own vehicles. Imported right-hand drive cars can be imported, but their use is rare.
This is partially because the car dealer lobby convinced congress to prevent the importation of cars less than 25 years old. Ironically, they did so using safety regulations, so a brand-new car meeting current European safety regulations is legally unsafe, but a 25-year-old car, complying with what European safety regulations were 25 years ago, less any deterioration in those safety systems, is legally safe.
Americans do that all the time though. E.g. Celsius vs Fahrenheit, Metric vs US Customary units, getting rid of copper coins, 230 vs 110 V electricity, etc.
The fact that large parts of the world do something without any problems is no guarantee that people in the U.S. won't argue about it endlessly.
Meanwhile on Reddit you will find people who delight in cutting charging cables they find plugged into street lights and the like. "Sticking it to the electricity thieves".
Quebec is ahead of the game vs most other places in North America when it comes to anything EV.
Having some of the cheapest and most plentiful electricity in North America, courtesy giant hydroelectric facilities, helps. (Also why it's a major aluminum producer)
As an EV owner, crossing the border into Quebec from Ontario gives me about 5x the charging options. Everything from ski hills to grocery stores are set up with a mixture of charging types it's great. Get a 20 minute DC fast charge while running into the IGA to grab groceries and conveniences blew my mind.
Those ONroutes in Ontario seemed pretty nice in terms of EV charging infrastructure planning as well. My road trip through Canada was in an ICE so I didn't actually get a real feel for the charging infrastructure, but seeing those definitely felt like the future of long shot highway travel. Looking at maps like plugshare though definitely made it feel like those were the oasis of good charging experiences with things getting more sparse as you continued to travel off the highway.
There were a number of good EV charging ideas I saw on my road trip through Canada.
I've heard they're unreliable and expensive. I don't fast charge much, but when I do I usually just hit a Tesla station and use the NACS adapter for my Polestar.
Electrify Canada was overall the best experience, though. No nonsense with installing a stupid custom app and setting up an account. Just tap credit card and go. Got full 150kW that my car can take. No hassle. Ate a burrito and returned to 80%.
I think the "bold innovation" framing partly because the current administration is making green technology a though crime, and partly just the ambient American tendency to describe any incremental improvement as groundbreaking.
In a documentary about a homeless encampment (in america) I viewed not long ago, the residents had spliced into a lamp post to provide power to their and their neighbours tents. It was truly a hacker inspired, move fast and break things approach.
This research seems to be inspired by the same content and appears to be an attempt to commercialise the same technology.
I can’t wait for people and companies to realize “oh no, we only wanted to give easy electricity access to rich people’s cars, not to the homeless people, let’s add another layer of dystopia to fix that”
I don’t know if I’d describe safeguards against misusing electrical systems as dystopian. If a system is made for a specific purpose and misuse is highly dangerous and disruptive, I’d certainly support reasonable safeguards.
Not sure if it’s more dystopian to not be able to have nice things (easy EV charging) or to prohibit the homeless from destructively misusing the EV chargers.
And after they implement the dystopia they'll inevitably use it to go after petty deviance by people who are rich enough to pay fines and leave the homeless who were the pretext for the dystopia un-bothered except just enough to let the useful idiots continue to think that that is in fact the purpose of the system.
I thought this was mostly about what kind of chargers are in there. But since the paper is not available, I guess we don't even know that.
I guess an open question (at least for me) is whether, in an urban setting, it's better to install a dozen fast chargers, or hundreds of slower chargers – like two for all 100 street lamps in an area.
What's more useful? Particularly in areas where people do drive a bit (the school run, shopping, whatever) but don't drive that much (they use transit, no huge daily commutes).
For me (apartment, shared garage, hard to adapt) I guess a more easily available but slower charger that replenishes the few kms that I drive every other day during a night seems more useful than scheduling a couple hours on fast charger on the supermarket… just to get there and find it's unavailable.
But they only installed 30 chargers, so it'll be hard to draw conclusions.
Pricing always seems to be ignored. Sure, my local council installed chargers in the village car park for people without off street parking, but that’s 50p/kWh compared to 8p for me charging at home.
This. The big inequity around being able to charge at home is the huge difference in price. These slow overnight chargers need to be very cheap to move the needle on EV accessibility.
Another aspect I'd wonder about is the cost for whatever organization is responsible for maintaining lamps in a district, presumably a slower charger is a lower specification and would be cheaper and more likely to be widely fitted or for the project to be approved in the first place, and limits the demands on the local electrical infrastructure. Once the initial install is done in a lamp it would seem that upgrading in future would be a smaller hurdle.
Interesting, but my immediate question is - streetlights draw much less power than a streetlight. So if several chargers in a street are to be used , how is overloading the street light circuit managed?
Maybe the available power for the circuit is equally divided between all the active chargers in the street. OR maybe only one charger allowed ?
This question seems not answered in the articale....
That was the first product released >10 years ago at my previous job [1]. The idea did not quite catch on, though, and the product was repurposed (successfully) as an OEM charger. There is not a lot of power available on street lamps and charging at 3.6kW is kind of slow. Consider that with almost the same hardware (especially the same expensive parts) and three-phase current, 22kW are possible.
It might turn out differently in the US, but it is hardly a new idea.
ive always wondered why, in "day stay" car parks (commuters etc) they dont have 6 to 8 cables from a charging point that can all connect to different cars and then do round robin charging. This solves the problem of one person being connected all day and preventing others from benefitting. This way a number of cars can be charged up without the inconvenience of just one person being constantly connected. We have chargers at work where this solution would prevent all the car shuffling and aggro associated with people managing access. in our case 3 cars could charge in a day, so 3 cables available to three spaces and charging done round robin. Probably not a novel idea but one id like to see implemented
This is a very solved problem. EV chargers can change the rate at which the car is charging.
I have a double-charger at home. If I plug in one car, it gets 40 amps. When I plug in two, both cars get 20 amps until one finishes, then it does a 32/8 split with the charging car getting 32 amps and the idle car getting 8 amps.
This is already built in to commercial EV chargers. Chargepoint (brand I’ve worked with the most) allows you to do pretty much anything you can think of related to power splitting/sharing. The units I’ve sold are either single or dual feed, so power sharing is between two cars on a single charger.
I've seen a few times people using the weather-guarded 120 VAC outlets (provisioned for power tools) on lamp posts at institutions to steal a bit of charge.
Just what I know about the majority of America, this seems like a terrible idea. Most downtown areas in America are pretty empty. This includes Kansas City. There are pockets but it’s not like a uk city where you have the style of small connected labor camp homes and it’s the norm to park on the street. I would much rather see multi unit buildings install these.
Your presumption is probably incorrect for a large number of lights. From what I've seen most streetlights around me in residential areas run off both mains with the neutral disconnected, implying they're running off the full 240V. Bigger lights probably run off even higher voltage runs.
Its a common misconception the US infrastructure is a 120V system. Your home has 240V and likely even has 240V appliances connected. Your individual outlets are only connected to one half of that 240V service.
Most street lights are either 240V or 480V single-phase, the higher voltage allows for smaller conductors over longer distances. Shorter, more decorative pole lights (say in a CBD) might be 120V.
Commercial pole lights can be 120V but are usually 208V (for 208V 3-phase services) or 277V (for 480V 3-phase services) in practice.
Robert Llewellyn (previously of Red Dwarf fame) covered this idea eight years ago (July 2017) on his 'electrify' channel:
> The simple and very commonplace lamp post will soon become a ubiquitous charge point for electric cars. They charge at about 5 kW, or 16 amps, not super fast but overnight charging is all most drivers need. Ubitricity is a German based company who've come up with a simple, cheap to install and well managed system for more people on more streets to adopt electric cars.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKaEhBjt1ls
See also pop-up chargers from six years ago:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frkw6aurVUY
They charge at about 5 kW, or 16 amps, not super fast
Our 14 year old Blink (no, not that one) Level 2 charger only does 5.8 kW, and it has served us fine for overnight charging even the 77 kWh battery in our current car.
I imagine it’d need to be managed somehow like shared level 2 chargers now because you can’t pull 5kW from every lamp at the same time.
16 amps is the amount I have to my home electric car charger, for overnight charging (Nissan Leaf.) That sounds _perfect_.
too bad that ubitricity was sold to Shell
16 amps is a typical ampacity rating for 2.5mm conductors. Authorities either have to upgrade their wiring or split current usage between the lighting fixture and the charger.
The wiring for many streetlights fates back to older lights that were sodium or halogen bulbs that were MUCH less power efficient. Most municipalities considering this technology will have swapped to LEDs. The theoretical carrying capacity of a light's wiring will be far beyond what the LED consumes.
Do these chargers require payment for the charge?
What prevents "squatting" at a post (either with an EV or an ICE)?
Just thinking of my neighborhood (THs, not flats, but still no dedicated parking), there's a lamp every 4th or 5th home, and most households have ~2 cars. People mostly park in front of their house today - if you have an ICE, but also a lamppost, it's a negative - you no longer get use of the closest space (or, you take the EV spot from an EV).
The neighborhood solved this by allowing a charge cable to the spot closest to your house. But, that's expensive to install, so not many have done so (electrical panel on back of house, parking on front, so interior cable pull through finished space of home, charge unit on front exterior wall, then conduit through yard and public sidewalk for the cable run to parking). Of course, this doesn't help with apartment parking or true public street side parking (our neighborhood own the parking lot as a shared amenity).
The model I have seen is that there's a cost for charging as well as parking after charging has completed. You get 20 minutes after charging has ended for free but there will be a blocking fee afterwards as long as the cable is still connected to the car and will be charged as part of the charging fee. If someone charges their car and then disconnects the cable and blocks the spot, they will be towed as the spot has a notice that it's only for charging devices.
I have seen those attached to light posts here in Germany but they all are in front of public area, not private houses so I guess it's only for charging, not parking.
In another point, if it's in front of a private property and the owner plan to occupy it for themselves, it would not make sense to install charger there as even when the owner is not charging, no one else can use.
I'm not sure about these particular ones. But I've heard that some similar chargers can get a unique ID for your car through the charging cable and use that for billing.
This is ISO 15118 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15118
It's interesting how this sounds like a cutting edge experiment, while this is a common thing to see in Germany and other European states for quite a while now.
I live in the UK; my postman walks up to my house and posts my letters through a flap in the door. I grew up in Australia, where our postman used to ride up to our letterbox on a postal-service-issued motorbike, because the suburban houses are too far apart to make walking economical.
The fact that putting EV chargers in lampposts works in Europe doesn't necessitate that doing so will work in the natural environment, built environment and cultural context of the US. They have to do their own assessments to work out the best solution to the same problem in a different context.
Well, if we are discussing the scenario where people live in tall buildings with no private parking available and need to park the car overnight on the street (which is the scenario depicted by the study)... It sounds a lot like your average European city.
In the US, the postal service contacts out rural mail routes, and in many states it's legal for the contractor to drive from the passenger seat.
> in many states it's legal for the contractor to drive from the passenger seat.
I doubt they're driving from the passenger seat. It's hard to reach the pedals from the passenger seat. Many mail delivery vehicles in the US are right hand drive; the driver's seat is on the right. I don't know that left hand drive is strictly required by any states, it's more a matter of there's not many models available for sale in the US with right hand drive as an option, and few people order them when available; and importing out of market RHD cars is a chore.
You can (or could) order some Jeeps in RHD, and a lot of rural USPS contractors have RHD minivans (many from the Japanese Domestic Market)
I did see a 'converted' RHD Windstar (Ford minivan) on FB Marketplace, where they removed the driver seat, put a flat platform in, and connected controls with cables and levers. That's an option too, I guess.
Oh that seems difficult. In Finland the postal service uses right hand drive cars.
They do in the US too, but contractors use their own vehicles. Imported right-hand drive cars can be imported, but their use is rare.
This is partially because the car dealer lobby convinced congress to prevent the importation of cars less than 25 years old. Ironically, they did so using safety regulations, so a brand-new car meeting current European safety regulations is legally unsafe, but a 25-year-old car, complying with what European safety regulations were 25 years ago, less any deterioration in those safety systems, is legally safe.
This is false.
Most rural routes are served by the USPS-proper.
If most, but not all routes are served by USPS proper, and the rest are contracted out, than it is true the USPS contracts out routes.
Americans do that all the time though. E.g. Celsius vs Fahrenheit, Metric vs US Customary units, getting rid of copper coins, 230 vs 110 V electricity, etc.
The fact that large parts of the world do something without any problems is no guarantee that people in the U.S. won't argue about it endlessly.
Indeed, the several streets around me in London just had hundreds of EV chargers attached to lampposts.
I saw them in London a couple of years ago, and they looked like they had been there for a long time then.
Meanwhile on Reddit you will find people who delight in cutting charging cables they find plugged into street lights and the like. "Sticking it to the electricity thieves".
I'll bet its even better since the standard voltage is double what the US uses, giving 2x energy over similar wires.
US municipal lighting is 240V.
Grants are given to those that can make the mundane seem new and exciting.
There were lamppost based chargers in Montréal last time I was there. They're a thing in North America as well.
Quebec is ahead of the game vs most other places in North America when it comes to anything EV.
Having some of the cheapest and most plentiful electricity in North America, courtesy giant hydroelectric facilities, helps. (Also why it's a major aluminum producer)
As an EV owner, crossing the border into Quebec from Ontario gives me about 5x the charging options. Everything from ski hills to grocery stores are set up with a mixture of charging types it's great. Get a 20 minute DC fast charge while running into the IGA to grab groceries and conveniences blew my mind.
Those ONroutes in Ontario seemed pretty nice in terms of EV charging infrastructure planning as well. My road trip through Canada was in an ICE so I didn't actually get a real feel for the charging infrastructure, but seeing those definitely felt like the future of long shot highway travel. Looking at maps like plugshare though definitely made it feel like those were the oasis of good charging experiences with things getting more sparse as you continued to travel off the highway.
There were a number of good EV charging ideas I saw on my road trip through Canada.
I've heard they're unreliable and expensive. I don't fast charge much, but when I do I usually just hit a Tesla station and use the NACS adapter for my Polestar.
Electrify Canada was overall the best experience, though. No nonsense with installing a stupid custom app and setting up an account. Just tap credit card and go. Got full 150kW that my car can take. No hassle. Ate a burrito and returned to 80%.
I think the "bold innovation" framing partly because the current administration is making green technology a though crime, and partly just the ambient American tendency to describe any incremental improvement as groundbreaking.
In a documentary about a homeless encampment (in america) I viewed not long ago, the residents had spliced into a lamp post to provide power to their and their neighbours tents. It was truly a hacker inspired, move fast and break things approach.
This research seems to be inspired by the same content and appears to be an attempt to commercialise the same technology.
I can’t wait for people and companies to realize “oh no, we only wanted to give easy electricity access to rich people’s cars, not to the homeless people, let’s add another layer of dystopia to fix that”
Homeless or not, their biggest concern is probably whether or not customers are paying for the electricity they use.
The homeless folk can nick the nice thick copper to strike back at the establishment. Or to by drugs.
It's just a matter of DRM-ing the smart connectors.
Maximum fragmentation, everything else is communism
I don’t know if I’d describe safeguards against misusing electrical systems as dystopian. If a system is made for a specific purpose and misuse is highly dangerous and disruptive, I’d certainly support reasonable safeguards.
Not sure if it’s more dystopian to not be able to have nice things (easy EV charging) or to prohibit the homeless from destructively misusing the EV chargers.
And after they implement the dystopia they'll inevitably use it to go after petty deviance by people who are rich enough to pay fines and leave the homeless who were the pretext for the dystopia un-bothered except just enough to let the useful idiots continue to think that that is in fact the purpose of the system.
there are actually junctions (and sometimes complete with outlets) in many lampposts so city employees can use them to power their equipment
wait until they learn to mine bitcoins.
The paper is here, but unfortunately this government funded research is not open access.
https://doi.org/10.1061/JUPDDM.UPENG-5865
I thought this was mostly about what kind of chargers are in there. But since the paper is not available, I guess we don't even know that.
I guess an open question (at least for me) is whether, in an urban setting, it's better to install a dozen fast chargers, or hundreds of slower chargers – like two for all 100 street lamps in an area.
What's more useful? Particularly in areas where people do drive a bit (the school run, shopping, whatever) but don't drive that much (they use transit, no huge daily commutes).
For me (apartment, shared garage, hard to adapt) I guess a more easily available but slower charger that replenishes the few kms that I drive every other day during a night seems more useful than scheduling a couple hours on fast charger on the supermarket… just to get there and find it's unavailable.
But they only installed 30 chargers, so it'll be hard to draw conclusions.
Pricing always seems to be ignored. Sure, my local council installed chargers in the village car park for people without off street parking, but that’s 50p/kWh compared to 8p for me charging at home.
This. The big inequity around being able to charge at home is the huge difference in price. These slow overnight chargers need to be very cheap to move the needle on EV accessibility.
Another aspect I'd wonder about is the cost for whatever organization is responsible for maintaining lamps in a district, presumably a slower charger is a lower specification and would be cheaper and more likely to be widely fitted or for the project to be approved in the first place, and limits the demands on the local electrical infrastructure. Once the initial install is done in a lamp it would seem that upgrading in future would be a smaller hurdle.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395791540_Equitable...
I've been using these in London for at least eight years. Strange to see it written up as a test here.
Someone will no doubt be pitching this new technology for the YC 2026 intake
Interesting, but my immediate question is - streetlights draw much less power than a streetlight. So if several chargers in a street are to be used , how is overloading the street light circuit managed?
Maybe the available power for the circuit is equally divided between all the active chargers in the street. OR maybe only one charger allowed ?
This question seems not answered in the articale....
That was the first product released >10 years ago at my previous job [1]. The idea did not quite catch on, though, and the product was repurposed (successfully) as an OEM charger. There is not a lot of power available on street lamps and charging at 3.6kW is kind of slow. Consider that with almost the same hardware (especially the same expensive parts) and three-phase current, 22kW are possible.
It might turn out differently in the US, but it is hardly a new idea.
[1] https://www.bender.de/ebee/berlin/
3.6 kW gives between 10 and 20 km of range per hour of charging depending on the vehicle you have. This is plenty fast enough for overnight charging.
Yes I've never bothered with a higher output for my own home charger, a standard outlet is plenty if you're parked every night
ive always wondered why, in "day stay" car parks (commuters etc) they dont have 6 to 8 cables from a charging point that can all connect to different cars and then do round robin charging. This solves the problem of one person being connected all day and preventing others from benefitting. This way a number of cars can be charged up without the inconvenience of just one person being constantly connected. We have chargers at work where this solution would prevent all the car shuffling and aggro associated with people managing access. in our case 3 cars could charge in a day, so 3 cables available to three spaces and charging done round robin. Probably not a novel idea but one id like to see implemented
This is a very solved problem. EV chargers can change the rate at which the car is charging.
I have a double-charger at home. If I plug in one car, it gets 40 amps. When I plug in two, both cars get 20 amps until one finishes, then it does a 32/8 split with the charging car getting 32 amps and the idle car getting 8 amps.
I believe tesla home chargers will coordinate among themselves.
This is already built in to commercial EV chargers. Chargepoint (brand I’ve worked with the most) allows you to do pretty much anything you can think of related to power splitting/sharing. The units I’ve sold are either single or dual feed, so power sharing is between two cars on a single charger.
I've seen a few times people using the weather-guarded 120 VAC outlets (provisioned for power tools) on lamp posts at institutions to steal a bit of charge.
Just what I know about the majority of America, this seems like a terrible idea. Most downtown areas in America are pretty empty. This includes Kansas City. There are pockets but it’s not like a uk city where you have the style of small connected labor camp homes and it’s the norm to park on the street. I would much rather see multi unit buildings install these.
Local scrap yards will now have a ton of copper wire AND charger handles
Presumably most US street lamps are 120V which is probably why we see this idea implemented in other countries that have 220V power everywhere.
Also worth noting that many towns in the US don't have street lamps or only have them in the CBD.
I don't know how standalone street lamps are wired in cities, but basically every US residential service transformer has 240v.
Your presumption is probably incorrect for a large number of lights. From what I've seen most streetlights around me in residential areas run off both mains with the neutral disconnected, implying they're running off the full 240V. Bigger lights probably run off even higher voltage runs.
Its a common misconception the US infrastructure is a 120V system. Your home has 240V and likely even has 240V appliances connected. Your individual outlets are only connected to one half of that 240V service.
Most street lights are either 240V or 480V single-phase, the higher voltage allows for smaller conductors over longer distances. Shorter, more decorative pole lights (say in a CBD) might be 120V.
Commercial pole lights can be 120V but are usually 208V (for 208V 3-phase services) or 277V (for 480V 3-phase services) in practice.