4 ms·

You'll need cities to do large scale deployments of streetlight chargers like these: https://electrek.co/2019/11/13/la-adds-hundreds-of-ev-chargers-to-streetlig

You'll need cities to do large scale deployments of streetlight chargers like these: https://electrek.co/2019/11/13/la-adds-hundreds-of-ev-chargers-to-streetlights-giving-renters-a-place-to-plug-in/ https://electrek.co/2019/11/13/la-adds-hundreds-of-ev-charge... I don't know if it'll require upgrades to the power grid. You've already got 240v in Europe, so that's only ~10 hours to charge a Tesla. But could it handle thousands of EVs charging simultaneously? If there's any place in the world that can do this it's Europe.

gambiting 6y ago
I still don't think that this will be anywhere enough. This is a street I used to live on: https://www.google.pl/maps/@54.9941128,-1.6077652,3a,75y,286.07h,83.41t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s7cvbpIjZQUq7Z8XmmLrpmQ!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D7cvbpIjZQUq7Z8XmmLrpmQ%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D120.73338%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.pl/maps/@54.9941128,-1.6077652,3a,75y,286... From top to bottom, it would fit about 40 cars - but there's only 6-8 street lamps? Ok, so maybe the council could fit a new charging post every 10 metres or so - but then the question is, with what money? There's hardly any cash to keep maintaining the roads at all, where would they find the money to dig up every single street in the city and put in charging posts? Even if they are paid, you'd wait a very long time to make your money back, and then there's another issue I have - at home, I can charge my car at about £0.12/kWh during the day and £0.05/kWh during the night. But public charging points I can see around at crazy expensive - like £0.30-£0.40 per kWh. At that point, it's literally cheaper to drive a good diesel.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  1000x this! People never stop to ask themselves who will pay for the infrastructure needed to upgrade the existing public electrical networks in our cities to support everyone charging their EVs on the street. Lots of European cities are broke at this point and have much bigger problems to fix right now than EV charging stations and if private companies would install them across the cities, the charging costs would be high enough to make EVs ownership unappealing. Add the fact that EVs here are more expensive than in the US and you have the reason why most EVs right now are only owned by upper class people who can afford to have their own private charging station on their own property. There's a reason diesel ICEs, as dirty as they are, are still so popular in Europe. They're cheap to run. Ironically, as green as it may be, Europe will fall behind China and the US at mass EV adoption. Unless they'd be given away for free, expecting EVs to take over the market here in 5 to 8 years is dreaming at best.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    Lots of European cities are broke at this point and have much bigger problems to fix right now than EV charging stations and if private companies would install them across the cities, the charging costs would be high enough to make EVs ownership unappealing. These European city planners should have listened to Strongtowns and other New Urbanists, and instead of encouraging suburban development style which makes prohibitively expensive for cities to maintain streets, instead followed the dense urban pattern of American cities.
  - petre 6y ago
    Western Europe will do it as means to incentivize auto sales after the pandemic. Car sales fell 80% in Europe. President Macron has already announced such a plan yesterday. This includes infrastructure: "The number of battery charge-points will be tripled to 100,000 by the end of next year." https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52814074 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52814074
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  The key to this is you don't build too many of them. The wires aren't the problem; you've already got a power grid carrying kilovolts along the same streets to power the buildings. The cost is the charging ports. So start with one, reserve the space for EVs and make it expensive. Then people won't want to use it. Most of the time they'll charge at work or some restaurant that installed a charging port to drive customers to its business. Which is why you only have to start with one -- the first one on the street is just for emergencies. You might have ten EVs in the area and one charging port because at any given time only one person is willing to pay that much to use it. Which also means that it's regularly in use and can recover its costs quickly. But then it's there if you really need it, so more people can feel comfortable buying EVs. Then once there are more EVs, you can install more charging ports -- they're paying for themselves, after all, as long as you don't install so many they don't stay in use. Then once you've paid off the capital cost you can lower the price, so more people use them, so you can build even more. When you have 10 charging ports but 9 are already paid off, you only have to charge 10% of the original premium to pay off the 10th. So in the long term you still end up with plenty of charging ports on the street at only a slightly higher price than they are in other places.
  - petre 6y ago
    The best thing would be to make them expensive when the vehicle is >70% charged so it incentivizes drivers to free the charger equipped parking spot when the vehicles is full of almost full. That way the charger becomes available to others.
jaclaz 6y ago
>I don't know if it'll require upgrades to the power grid. You've already got 240v in Europe, so that's only ~10 hours to charge a Tesla. But could it handle thousands of EVs charging simultaneously? Rest assured it will, and not only on the power grid. Back of the envelope calculation. A modern lamp post (one every 30 mt or so) is (led based) 60-80-100W, if infrastructure (cables) are not so recent, previous generation of street lightning were 150-250W per post. Cables are dimensioned accurately to carry that kind of current/power. A charging every 30 mt needs to serve 6-7 cars, we are talking of 7-10KW, i.e. 7000-10000 W, something like 40 times the power the infrastructure was designed for. And each 300 mt stretch of street will need something in the order of magnitude of 70-100KW, and since all cars will be charged at night, there are very little to be spared for non-contemporaneus power usage.
nucleardog 6y ago
Our city had to ban cords running across the sidewalk after too many slip and fall incidents. In areas where the street lights are set onto the property side of the sidewalk (or even into lawns) rather than on the sidewalk abutting the street (most NA residential areas I think) I don't see this idea gaining a lot of traction. Or at least not remaining for long past the sidewalk turning into an obstacle course for the elderly and others with limited movement.

gambiting 6y ago

I still don't think that this will be anywhere enough. This is a street I used to live on: https://www.google.pl/maps/@54.9941128,-1.6077652,3a,75y,286.07h,83.41t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s7cvbpIjZQUq7Z8XmmLrpmQ!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D7cvbpIjZQUq7Z8XmmLrpmQ%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D120.73338%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.pl/maps/@54.9941128,-1.6077652,3a,75y,286... From top to bottom, it would fit about 40 cars - but there's only 6-8 street lamps? Ok, so maybe the council could fit a new charging post every 10 metres or so - but then the question is, with what money? There's hardly any cash to keep maintaining the roads at all, where would they find the money to dig up every single street in the city and put in charging posts? Even if they are paid, you'd wait a very long time to make your money back, and then there's another issue I have - at home, I can charge my car at about £0.12/kWh during the day and £0.05/kWh during the night. But public charging points I can see around at crazy expensive - like £0.30-£0.40 per kWh. At that point, it's literally cheaper to drive a good diesel.

ChuckNorris89 6y ago
1000x this! People never stop to ask themselves who will pay for the infrastructure needed to upgrade the existing public electrical networks in our cities to support everyone charging their EVs on the street. Lots of European cities are broke at this point and have much bigger problems to fix right now than EV charging stations and if private companies would install them across the cities, the charging costs would be high enough to make EVs ownership unappealing. Add the fact that EVs here are more expensive than in the US and you have the reason why most EVs right now are only owned by upper class people who can afford to have their own private charging station on their own property. There's a reason diesel ICEs, as dirty as they are, are still so popular in Europe. They're cheap to run. Ironically, as green as it may be, Europe will fall behind China and the US at mass EV adoption. Unless they'd be given away for free, expecting EVs to take over the market here in 5 to 8 years is dreaming at best.
- xyzzyz 6y ago
  Lots of European cities are broke at this point and have much bigger problems to fix right now than EV charging stations and if private companies would install them across the cities, the charging costs would be high enough to make EVs ownership unappealing. These European city planners should have listened to Strongtowns and other New Urbanists, and instead of encouraging suburban development style which makes prohibitively expensive for cities to maintain streets, instead followed the dense urban pattern of American cities.
- petre 6y ago
  Western Europe will do it as means to incentivize auto sales after the pandemic. Car sales fell 80% in Europe. President Macron has already announced such a plan yesterday. This includes infrastructure: "The number of battery charge-points will be tripled to 100,000 by the end of next year." https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52814074 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-52814074
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
The key to this is you don't build too many of them. The wires aren't the problem; you've already got a power grid carrying kilovolts along the same streets to power the buildings. The cost is the charging ports. So start with one, reserve the space for EVs and make it expensive. Then people won't want to use it. Most of the time they'll charge at work or some restaurant that installed a charging port to drive customers to its business. Which is why you only have to start with one -- the first one on the street is just for emergencies. You might have ten EVs in the area and one charging port because at any given time only one person is willing to pay that much to use it. Which also means that it's regularly in use and can recover its costs quickly. But then it's there if you really need it, so more people can feel comfortable buying EVs. Then once there are more EVs, you can install more charging ports -- they're paying for themselves, after all, as long as you don't install so many they don't stay in use. Then once you've paid off the capital cost you can lower the price, so more people use them, so you can build even more. When you have 10 charging ports but 9 are already paid off, you only have to charge 10% of the original premium to pay off the 10th. So in the long term you still end up with plenty of charging ports on the street at only a slightly higher price than they are in other places.
- petre 6y ago
  The best thing would be to make them expensive when the vehicle is >70% charged so it incentivizes drivers to free the charger equipped parking spot when the vehicles is full of almost full. That way the charger becomes available to others.

jaclaz 6y ago

>I don't know if it'll require upgrades to the power grid. You've already got 240v in Europe, so that's only ~10 hours to charge a Tesla. But could it handle thousands of EVs charging simultaneously? Rest assured it will, and not only on the power grid. Back of the envelope calculation. A modern lamp post (one every 30 mt or so) is (led based) 60-80-100W, if infrastructure (cables) are not so recent, previous generation of street lightning were 150-250W per post. Cables are dimensioned accurately to carry that kind of current/power. A charging every 30 mt needs to serve 6-7 cars, we are talking of 7-10KW, i.e. 7000-10000 W, something like 40 times the power the infrastructure was designed for. And each 300 mt stretch of street will need something in the order of magnitude of 70-100KW, and since all cars will be charged at night, there are very little to be spared for non-contemporaneus power usage.

nucleardog 6y ago

Our city had to ban cords running across the sidewalk after too many slip and fall incidents. In areas where the street lights are set onto the property side of the sidewalk (or even into lawns) rather than on the sidewalk abutting the street (most NA residential areas I think) I don't see this idea gaining a lot of traction. Or at least not remaining for long past the sidewalk turning into an obstacle course for the elderly and others with limited movement.