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.

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.

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.

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".

There were lamppost based chargers in Montréal last time I was there. They're a thing in North America as well.

Grants are given to those that can make the mundane seem new and exciting.

I'll bet its even better since the standard voltage is double what the US uses, giving 2x energy over similar wires.

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.

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.

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”

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.

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.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395791540_Equitable...

Someone will no doubt be pitching this new technology for the YC 2026 intake

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.

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 believe tesla home chargers will coordinate among themselves.

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.

I don't know how standalone street lamps are wired in cities, but basically every US residential service transformer has 240v.