Using Street Lamps as EV Chargers
11 comments
·November 4, 2025blitzar
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.
tomaskafka
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”
rbanffy
It's just a matter of DRM-ing the smart connectors.
koehr
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.
cjs_ac
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.
SiempreViernes
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.
Symbiote
The paper is here, but unfortunately this government funded research is not open access.
ncruces
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.
keyringlight
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.
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