Detroit Is Turning Lampposts Into Internet-Connected EV Chargers (insideevs.com) 106
An anonymous reader shares a report: Curbside EV charging in Michigan should become easier in the coming months thanks to a new collaboration between telecom giant AT&T and lamppost EV charging startup Voltpost. The two have joined forces to bring internet connectivity to EV charging posts across Michigan and the Metro-Detroit area-this way, the operator knows immediately if a stall has gone offline and can send a team to fix it faster. Better uptime benefits both the company and the EV drivers who choose to top up their cars' batteries while parked.
Voltpost's lamppost charging solution essentially turns existing street lights into EV chargers. The startup claims the installation of a single stall takes anywhere from one to two hours and that the costs are much lower than a conventional EV charging station. However, the caveat here is that the charging speeds are limited to what one would experience with a home charger. The AC Level 2 lamppost chargers are powered by the street lighting grid, which was never designed to sustain high loads, so expect to keep the car plugged in for hours. That said, the system can still come in handy when the owner of an EV goes to work and parks the car on the street. Or during a lengthy shopping trip topped off with an evening movie. It's no DC fast charger, but it doesn't claim to be one.
Voltpost's lamppost charging solution essentially turns existing street lights into EV chargers. The startup claims the installation of a single stall takes anywhere from one to two hours and that the costs are much lower than a conventional EV charging station. However, the caveat here is that the charging speeds are limited to what one would experience with a home charger. The AC Level 2 lamppost chargers are powered by the street lighting grid, which was never designed to sustain high loads, so expect to keep the car plugged in for hours. That said, the system can still come in handy when the owner of an EV goes to work and parks the car on the street. Or during a lengthy shopping trip topped off with an evening movie. It's no DC fast charger, but it doesn't claim to be one.
What is the rating for salt spray, Marine Grade? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is my concern with anything mounted outside in Michigan along a road, how is protected from the elements from -30F to 120F with 65F daily swings on spring days? Can it be repaired without a 100 day service ticket? What is the contract to get the next great thing in the spot when this company falls out of favor of the politicians or the stock market.
Re:What is the rating for salt spray, Marine Grade (Score:5, Informative)
So here in Finland we have "heating posts" in a lot of parking lots. It's basically a small pillar that terminates in a pair of standard 230V AC connections rated for about 2kW per socket, intermittent. Newer ones that came recently are usually around 3-4kW constant.
They are effectively build into plastic housing. This is what they look like: https://images.sanoma-sndp.fi/... [sanoma-sndp.fi]
It locks, you open it and plug it in to use. Usually runs an interior heater and coolant/oil pan heater from Defa for 2 hours, on 24h timer set within the box. More advanced ones can also trickle charge 12V battery. Intermittency of usage is required because underground cabling isn't rated for 2kW per socket constant as it will overheat and catch fire. Corrosion isn't really an issue with these due to covers and plastic housing not caring about it. Most of these look old because they are old. Decades old with minimal maintenance. Locks on these tend to fail before electric parts do, because they are actually exposed to elements and aren't exactly expensive locks.
Newer ones rated for upper end AC charging have been an utter bitch to integrate. My parents recently had their parking lot upgraded with those. It required tearing the whole thing up, laying new cables, installing new heating posts and repaving everything. It still resulted in only a handful out of total supporting constant charging. And because of how expensive it was to do this, electricity from them is hilariously expensive on top of monthly contract (you rent a specific parking spot , and if you want to charge, you have to pay extra rent + electricity fee + premium + service charge). Supposedly these also have a significantly elevated failure rate due to added complexity, and many of the new ones do not support charging (I have no idea why, but "check with us if your heat post supports EV charging" was in bold red text in the booklet sent to all housing that has right to rent these parking spots).
There has been a lot of talk about integrating newer types into lamp posts for purposes of street parking charging in cities. It's been mostly talk, because logistics are actually hard. Starting from lamp post wiring also being insufficient for constant load of required magnitude to "how do you set up access" to "who pays for the whole thing".
But technically, this is doable. Expensive, logistically difficult and maintenance needs to be figured out. But it can be made to work. Granted this is in a high trust society, I imagine Chicago with its criminality will have a lot of vandalism problems on top of everything else.
Distributed manufacturing opportunity (Score:2)
Sounds like a way to use the electricity for a distributed manufacturing setup.
Still wondering when EV owners will be able to use a 'free' charger somewhere, go home and then use the EV to power their house for the night using the energy obtained elsewhere.
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Never. It will always cost money to generate and transmit power.
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Some enterprising individual will use the 'free lamppost energy' instead of paying for their own electricity.
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Tell me you don't understand power generation without telling me you don't understand power generation.
First, you don't even comprehend that transit costs. Second, you don't understand that "negative price" is a political outcome. It still costs money to generate this electricity. But there was a political decision to defer these costs either to other times of production, or to the public purse.
Re:What is the rating for salt spray, Marine Grade (Score:5, Interesting)
We have telephone pole mounted chargers in my town. We definitely have tons of salt used on our roads, but it's not a problem because everything is mounted about fifteen feet in the air. You scan a QR code with the app, and the charger reels out enough cable until the plug is hanging within reach. You then push a button on the plug to pay out enough cable to reach your charger port. When you unplug the charger the cable automatically reels back up.
The system has been working flawlessly for several years, and weather doesn't cause any problems at all. The main problem with is that there are a limited number of chargers installed and the spaces are usually taken up by ICE vehicles. The system needs to be expanded, and there probably needs to be some kind of reservation system to allow predictable access. But aside from the economic and logistic challenges, this physical design is certainly practical for a location with severe weather.
The Detroit design looks a lot more vulnerable, with the plug located about four feet above sidewalk level I would think snowbanks would pose a problem. I'd have put them at least a foot higher, but perhaps there were wheelchair accessibility concerns. Mounting the system higher and having the plug descend is much better for protecting the installation from weather mishaps and vandalism.
Re: What is the rating for salt spray, Marine Grad (Score:2)
However, the caveat here is that the charging speeds are limited to what one would experience with a home charger. The AC Level 2 lamppost chargers are powered by the street lighting grid, which was never designed to sustain high loads, so expect to keep the car plugged in for hours. That said, the system can still come in handy when the owner of an EV goes to work and parks the car on the street. Or during a lengthy shopping trip topped off with an evening movie. It's no DC fast charger, but it doesn't claim to be one.
So the idea is, litter the city with low-cost, slow-speed chargers, then have people park their cars near the lamp posts and leave them there for hours while they work 8 hrs, or go to dinner & a movie? Doesn't anyone here see the problem? The second biggest problem I hear about with public EV chargers is that they are always occupied (the biggest problem I hear is finding a working charger).
It sounds like each charger might get 4-5 users/day, that covers the costs? (And what about non-EVs parking near t
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You missed how the internet connectivity literally addresses the problem you are having: Maintenance and availability management.
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A common complaint (on Slashdot, from people who do not have experience with EVs) is that people who do not have homes with off-street private parking places have no place to charge their EVs daily, requiring that they waste time at DC Fast-Chargers. This provides a solution to THAT problem. Charging is available while parked in public parking spaces on public streets.
You completely misunderstood the article.
Re: What is the rating for salt spray, Marine Gra (Score:2)
They are slow chargers, taking hours to charge an EV - the article clearly describes the anticipated use case - park in the spot while at work, while on an extended shopping trip, or while having dinner and watching a movie - this is not a 20-30 minute top-off visit at a fast charger.
They describe the chargers as being similar to home plug-in chargers that work off a regular outlet in the garage.
You entirely missed the limitations of what is being discussed.
The internet at the charge station will allow the
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This article is about adding WiFi/Internet to a couple dozen stand alone charging stations littered around the city.
No. It is about adding slow chargers on light poles around the city. The internet connectivity is a part of that -you need to use the phone app to use it.
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Option 1: Park out on the street for my work day taking up a parking spot
Option 2: Park out on the street for my work day taking up a parking spot and get a charge for my EV
Re: What is the rating for salt spray, Marine Grad (Score:5, Informative)
So the idea is, litter the city with low-cost, slow-speed chargers, then have people park their cars near the lamp posts and leave them there for hours while they work 8 hrs, or go to dinner & a movie?
The idea is to test the physical installation design's practicality. Since there are only 23 of them in a city of thirty thousand, there was no need to make major changes to our power network to run this test. These devices are spread out across the city in a number of different kinds installation sites to test how they stand up in different kinds of situations. Some are at commuter rail stations, some are near business areas, some are in recreational areas, some are in densely settled neighborhoods with multifamily houses. There are not enough of them in any area to significantly affect traffic or electricity consumption patterns, because that's not the purpose of the test.
Overall the test shows this design is extremely robust and reliable, and easy to use. Four to five users per day would actually pay for a single charger in a year or two, and these things clearly have more than four or five years of service life. But it's not really needed for our town, which is a commuter suburbs whose public amenities are pretty much exclusively used by residents almost all of whom have a place to put their own charger. The design has uses for things like commuter parking lots, or to make EV charging available to certain kinds of residential neighborhoods.
Unless I missed something in the summary, they aren't talking about expanding the charger network, they're talking about AT&T putting WiFi/internet service at each lamp post charger...
You missed something. The Detroit project is EV chargers that are connected to the Internet because that's how they'll be managed.
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Well, sure. But you don't just slap together a light rail vehicle and then buy a hundred of them and put them out on the street. You beta test them -- in the original sense of the word before software people made that nearly meaningless.
What odds are we giving.... (Score:1)
On the majority of these streetlamp chargers still being functional 18 months from now?
I wouldn't give them better than 1 in 5 odds, they'll probably give up maintaining them after they get vandalized for the 8th or 9th time.
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When I was living in Ukraine I was warned to watch out for missing manhole covers as they were stolen for scrape metal value. I never saw that happen while I was there. Despite the risk of being stolen most countries still use metal manhole covers. How would EV chargers be any different from manhole covers, they are both in public spaces and have scrape value if stolen
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I tried that search prefixed with my country and the first page was all reports for the same a single incident where the driver of the Ford Ranger was arrested for intentional damage and also driving with excess breath alcohol.
The reality is EV charging is just another publicly accessible service and the state of them is a reflect of the community they are located in. Ask BEV owners how
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Manhole covers are extremely heavy and made from iron which has almost no scrap value until you're talking literal tons of the stuff. EV charger cords are relatively lightweight and contain copper wires, which are quite valuable as scrap.
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Tesla started using aluminum wiring to stop the crackheads and tweakers from stealing it.
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Tesla started using aluminum wiring to stop the crackheads and tweakers from stealing it.
and also extremely short cords, which literally require ignoring the vehicle's proximity alert when backing into the charging stall. Since getting a NACS adapter for my Chevy Bolt, I've already noticed a few Tesla chargers with collision damage, probably because no one at Tesla had the foresight to make the cord at least long enough so you could stop backing up when the car warns you to brake.
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Put the charge port where it belongs (Score:2)
Ask your manufacturer to put the charge port where it belongs : leftside rearwards.
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Placement should become the standard. (Score:2)
Tesla set the standard (most cars sold) -> Back Left, even in RHD countries.
https://preview.redd.it/charge... [preview.redd.it]
Yes, it can stick out, but it is more convenient for daily use, and it greatly reduces needed cable length on public chargers (and many associated problems), so it really should become the standard.
Re:What odds are we giving.... (Score:5, Informative)
Lamp-post chargers don't have any built-in cords! They look like this:
https://ubitricity.com/en/char... [ubitricity.com]
There's nothing to steal
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Lamp-post chargers don't have any built-in cords! There's nothing to steal
According to the article (I read it a day or two ago) these have retractable cords mounted about head height that pull down to connect to the vehicle which are released when you activate the unit on the app. Until released by the app, the cord is retracted in a plastic looking box mounted on the light pole.
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I'll suggest a Chargehanger.
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They don't look like that. Click the link in TFS, it's literally easier than going out and searching for a picture of something that is *checks notes* not being build or talked about here.
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If you read the article, that's not what they're installing here. They're installing retractable cables, which I'm sure that the "copper recyclers" will love.
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Re: What odds are we giving.... (Score:2)
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This is indeed the default solution: https://ubitricity.com/en/char... [ubitricity.com]
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Yep. Very common in Europe.
Re: What odds are we giving.... (Score:1)
What they are doing is taking scarce city street parking spaces, dedicating them to EVs, and will likely ticket/tow any non-EV in the spot.
Oh, and if an EV does park there for a charge, it will likely get one overnight customer, followed by a near-by store/office worker for 8-9 hours, then maybe a customer that parks there while they get dinner & movie near-by. Three customers, that's gonna be it - remember, these are slow-speed chargers:
However, the caveat here is that the charging speeds are limited to what one would experience with a home charger. The AC Level 2 lamppost chargers are powered by the street lighting grid, which was never designed to sustain high loads, so expect to keep the car plugged in for hours. That said, the system can still come in handy when the owner of an EV goes to work and parks the car on the street. Or during a lengthy shopping trip topped off with an evening movie. It's no DC fast charger, but it doesn't claim to be one.
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What they are doing is taking scarce city street parking spaces, dedicating them to EVs, and will likely ticket/tow any non-EV in the spot.
LIAR
Re: What odds are we giving.... (Score:1)
So I can park a non-EV vehicle in the charging poles space and it's not a problem? It won't be considered restricted parking, and the city won't tow my car because I'm blocking the EV charger?
I expect these spaces will be treated like Handicaped parking spaces, non-EVs will at a minimum be fined, and may possibly be towed if warranted (repeat/extended violation).
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Yes. It is on-street public parking. They are not restricted, assigned, or controlled access (beyond normal parking restrictions in the areas).
What about charge port location? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one case where I think Tesla made a big mistake. Unless it's a one way street- the Tesla charge port is on the wrong side for curbside charging (and for anyone else who also uses the driver's side like the Ford Mach-E). For EVs to become ubiquitous in cities (where they are the most beneficial), we need solutions like this that allow charging at the curb, and moving the charge port to the passenger side would make that a lot easier with no real downside.
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It was probably styled after regular cars, most of which have their gas tank opening on the driver's side. Looking at the fuel gauge, an arrow points to which side the gas tank opening is located, so some might point to the passenger side.
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It was probably styled after regular cars, most of which have their gas tank opening on the driver's side.
Most regular cars made by Japanese companies, and they have the filler on the side where the driver would be in their country... on what is the passenger side in this country. Ironically, having it on the non-driver side is MUCH smarter, because it means you can pull up closer to the pump and still get out of the car. (I know the filler and the driver's door are in different places, but there's usually other crap between the pumps.)
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My car's a Fiat Punto, and the gas tank opening is on the passenger side.
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I've had some cars with the tank on the right, and some with it on the left- though the left side is more common. Ironically, I have an old British Mini that's right hand drive, but the tank is on the left hand side.
Still, Tesla put a lot of effort into making people think their cars were better than regular cars so I don't think this would have been a deal-breaker.
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Re: What about charge port location? (Score:2)
Ironically, I have an old British Mini that's right hand drive, but the tank is on the left hand side.
Ironically? There are countless American cars with the gas cap on the passenger side, is that also "ironic"?
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With the notable exception of Tesla's Superchargers, most public EV chargers have long enough cords to reach the charging port wherever it happens to be.
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Yeah, but if you are parked along a street in the city- that would mean the charge cord and handle were sticking out into the street where the traffic is. That seems like a pretty terrible idea to me.
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If you are driving close enough to parked cars to hit the charging cord, you are close enough to hit the mirrors. I'm sure it WILL happen... but people should drive better. Still no excuse for bad design of the vehicle.
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I think a more likely scenario is a cyclist riding close to the parked card to avoid traffic, not seeing the cord/charge handle, and colliding with it- but it's also possible a lower car's mirror hits it, or the cord gets kicked out into the street further by someone trying to get to their own car and it gets run over.
I agree that people should drive better and leave more room, but unfortunately that's just not reality in a lot of places.
Re: What about charge port location? (Score:1)
I think a more likely scenario is a cyclist riding close to the parked card to avoid traffic
"More likely"? Where do you live? In my experience cyclists feel they are equal to motor vehicles and ride in the middle of the road, they feel the motor vehicles need to avoid them.
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The more experienced ones, sure, but plenty of inexperienced folks "want to stay out of the way". And go to any smaller city where cars are still king and drivers almost try to enforce such riding. But whatever- none of this changes the fact that there are a bunch of good reasons to put it on the passenger side and few if any reasons to put it on the driver's side.
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I think a more likely scenario is a cyclist riding close to the parked card to avoid traffic, not seeing the cord/charge handle, and colliding with it
Ouch. Yeah. I could see that happening. It is poor riding to be that close to parked cars... but when your attention is focused on the moving cars it would be possible to not see a cord sticking out of a parked car.
but it's also possible a lower car's mirror hits it
You would have to be driving so close as to be scraping the parked cars with your mirror -more a case of bad driving than anything to do with the charging cord.
or the cord gets kicked out into the street further by someone trying to get to their own car and it gets run over.
I don't see how this is possible. The cord pulls down from a box mounted above car height on the utility pole. It retracts into the
Re: What about charge port location? (Score:1)
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Or put a charge port on both sides...
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That would be great but with manufacturers removing physical buttons just to save a few cents- I can't imagine they'd want to add an entire second charge port and wiring.
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Or put a charge port on both sides...
That would be great but with manufacturers removing physical buttons just to save a few cents- I can't imagine they'd want to add an entire second charge port and wiring.
I get that. As an alternative, they could just reserve the space for another port, maybe with a cover/filler plate and make the port equipment/wiring capable of being (re)installed on either side by either a dealer or owner. Though not as flexible as having two ports at once, one on each side, it would allow the vehicle to be re-configured after the fact.
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This is one case where I think Tesla made a big mistake. Unless it's a one way street- the Tesla charge port is on the wrong side for curbside charging
Or they did it on purpose to force owners to use their chargers more often.
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They could have offered their own curb-side recharging option or just sold equipment for projects like these streetlights and made money on that. But it doesn't work with the door on the street side.
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Isn't charging cable that comes with Tesla long enough to reach these?
Middle of front and/or back. (Score:2)
Re: What about charge port location? (Score:2)
Unless it's a one way street- the Tesla charge port is on the wrong side for curbside charging (and for anyone else who also uses the driver's side like the Ford Mach-E).
How do Europeans/others park their cars? Perhaps they considered the world market, not just the U.S. market?
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It's legal in Finland to park on either side even on a two-way street.
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EVs are a golden opportunity to put the charge ports in a sensible position, like the front, and avoid all the left/right nonsense. Unfortunately many manufacturers seem to have decided to put them where the old fossil fuel ports were, which is terrible for a number of reasons. Not least when parking on public streets to charge.
The front is the correct place for the charge port. Every EV that puts it somewhere else is a mistake.
Great idea if it's cost effective (Score:2)
Unsure on how much it costs to deliver and maintain these chargers, but it's conceptually brilliant. Ubiquitous trickle charging is what we need; not limited numbers of fast chargers.
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Parking lots at work too. (Score:3)
The lights there came off the 480 V service main. Due to some delta to wye trickery the lights operated at 277 V. (Ask an EE.)
That's more than enough voltage, but what size wire is installed?
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Almost never enough to meaningfully increase the load, because copper is expensive. No sane engineer would overbuild those cables by any significant margin as that's a lot of money going into copper that doesn't need to be spent.
You will almost certainly need to dig up streets for this to lay more cable. Recent switch to LEDs exacerbated this, as LEDs use less power for same illumination compared to previous street lamps.
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Depends what problem you're trying to solve. For road trips, you absolutely need DCFC. For people who can't charge their EVs at home, you might potentially convince some of those people to give up their ICE cars if public L2 charging was ubiquitous and very cheap, but I don't see the cheap part happening.
The Target by me has a few L2 chargers that are free for the first two hours and I've regularly seen people gaming it by setting a timer on their phone and ending and restarting the charging session so th
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Depends what problem you're trying to solve.
Yep.
For lamp-post charging, I'll say the niche is not getting a full long-range charge, but is for a low-range EV intended as an in-town runabout, to give it enough charge that you can go shopping or to a restaurant in town, charge while you're shopping, and go home.
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For lamp-post charging, I'll say the niche is not getting a full long-range charge, but is for a low-range EV intended as an in-town runabout, to give it enough charge that you can go shopping or to a restaurant in town, charge while you're shopping, and go home.
Unless we reverse course on the tariffs against BYD, I don't see that niche being filled anytime soon. The trend with EVs seems to be towards bigger batteries, faster charging and more range, and a price tag to match.
Re:Great idea if it's cost effective (Score:4, Informative)
Not really. At least in Europe, the use case is people who park on-street overnight, to get somewhere close to 100% charged. In the UK, these charge at about 5kW, which is enough to do most EVs overnight 20 to 100%. So you plug in once a fortnight or so, meaning a ratio of several owners per lamp post is fine (ie 5:1, not 50:1 and not 1:1)
Re: Great idea if it's cost effective (Score:2)
You absolutely need fast chargers. But mostly that's a solved problem. The bigger hurdle to EV adoption now isn't charging for long trips; it's the unaddressed market of those who don't live or work where they can charge. For these people, being able to charge slowly sort of wherever you go will go a long way to enabling adoption.
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It's up and running in many other countries already. It doesn't cost that much to put in.
https://ubitricity.com/en/char... [ubitricity.com]
Better use of infrastructure (Score:3)
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Because there is a majority of us in the US, that prefer to be able to travel door-to-door on our own time schedule...and to have the hauling capacity for grocery and other shopping, larger than what our two arms and a backpack can carry at any given time.
Most of us feel that independence is a wonderful thing.
But, feel free
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It's not just US. It's everywhere in the world. This is why automobiles sell well worldwide. The moment people become wealthy enough to afford one, they tend to buy one because freedom granted by this massive jump in personal mobility is worth it.
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Judging by the results of the recent election, I'd say you're not going to get us Americans to give up our cars. For what it's worth, we're apparently not even too keen on giving up the concept of our cars running on gas.
And I say this as someone who already has two EVs in my household. At least we bought them before the tax credit inevitably goes *poof*.
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Great if you live in the local area, sucks if you have to come into the city or if you need a car to go beyond the city.
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If only there was some way to handle that the three times a year that happens for most people whose job isn't inherently mobile or extremely rural [aaa.com]. You know, the same one you're probably going to be using after getting off our national transit system near a national park anyway (and maybe we could do more about reducing the car traffic in our national parks while we're at it, nobody's going on vacation to want to sit in a traffic jam who isn't going to a motor circuit instead).
Normal people don't want to l
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Car rentals aren't magic.
a) there's already ppl renting them for holidays where they flew across the country to join their families.
b) the cost of a rental includes the capex for the vehicles, as well as other fixed costs including storage and licensing/registration.
If we assume that people who only own a car capable of their daily commute will need to rent for the 3x/year they go over the hill and through the woods to grandma's house... then the size of the rental fleet will have to increase.
But if a subst
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Normal cities have public transportation so this is only a problem for reaching the 15% of Americans live outside city limits.
In what reality will $10,000 a year be worth three trips? Depreciat
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So first... "over the hill and through the woods" implies that either Grandma isn't in the city, even if the family is... or that she's in a different town. Some distance away.
That was my experience... albeit moreso for my mom's side. Different counties even. A few counties away.
There's also something about increased mobility in the US over the last 20 years. Families moving further away from each other, getting married to ppl who grew up further away.
Then there's your "15% outside of cities" figure. That n
Re: Better use of infrastructure (Score:2)
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I lived on the border of Sunnyvale CA for ~5 years, near SR85/82/237. It was walkable... if all ou wanted was to go grocery shopping. That part was great.
It wasn't so walkable if you wanted to get to work. even with traffic as bad as it was, it took well under half the time to take a car vs take a bus [and/or the light rail, depending where you're going]. My flatmate at the time worked about 3 years of that time in Alviso, about a year at Google [hence the location we lived in], and about a year in Fremont.
Re: Better use of infrastructure (Score:3)
Street EV (Score:2)
They've been talking about this for years but there's a problem.
The sodium vapour bulbs were replaced with LED bulbs but neither pull more than 1000W. The LEDs had slowly replaced all the old lamps because they don't pull more than about 80W (that's literally a no-brainer for any authority in charge of powering street lighting). So at best you have some 30-year-old legacy cabling that's been out in the wind and rain and supports 1000W. But more likely it's been renewed, replaced or installed with the exp
Parking meters (Score:2)
Another good place to put these are on parking meters. Could bundle parking and power into a single transaction. Could even push a notification that your 2 hour limit is about to expire for spots with limits.
street side (Score:2)
Who pays? (Score:2)
Who's paying for all this, and for the electricity?