Electric charging points - Streetlights?
Discussion
I was just thinking about this the other day.
Personally I think the future is electric cars, especially in urban areas, and as we all know there's a shortage of charging points.
Any reason why street lights couldn't be converted to include this function?
I'm not (overtly) daft, I appreciate you can't just whack a charging point in it so a significant degree of modification is required, along with designs to prevent abuse etc., but surely having a large electrified structure exactly where you need it seems the starting point to modify rather than insist on building new charging points?
Or am I missing something very obvious and the alternative really is bespoke charging points everywhere?
Personally I think the future is electric cars, especially in urban areas, and as we all know there's a shortage of charging points.
Any reason why street lights couldn't be converted to include this function?
I'm not (overtly) daft, I appreciate you can't just whack a charging point in it so a significant degree of modification is required, along with designs to prevent abuse etc., but surely having a large electrified structure exactly where you need it seems the starting point to modify rather than insist on building new charging points?
Or am I missing something very obvious and the alternative really is bespoke charging points everywhere?
There was talk about this last year, as with these things though.... it will take 5 years to plan and 10 years to implement by councils.
Edit
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/oct/05/elec...
Lamp-post charging
There are 700,000 lamp-posts in London alone, and about 7.5m across the country, all handily connected to electricity and right outside our homes. Is retrofitting them with plug-in points the way forward? According to Richard Stobart of Char.gy, one of the firms handed £37m in grants by the Department of Transport to develop new charging schemes, the standard lamp-post is connected to a 25 amp supply. If they have gone over to LED, then that leaves 24 amps for charging cars. “You will be able to get around 20 miles of driving for every hour of charging at a lamp-post,” says Stobart. Electric cars don’t have to be charged up every night – Stobart charges his Renault Zoe once a week – so in an ideal world, one lamp-post could charge many cars each week, especially in cities where mileage tends to be relatively low.
Last November Char.gy set up the first 50 lamp-post charging points in London in a deal with Southwark council, while in February Siemens/Ubitricity began installing 210 in Richmond upon Thames. It costs about £1,000 to add a charging point to a lamp-post.
Many charging points were free at first, but charges have now crept in. For example, in Dundee they have been free, but from November the cost will be 15p/kWh, plus a connection fee of 38p. The latest Nissan Leaf comes with 40kWh battery, and to work out the cost of “filling up”, you multiply the size of battery (kWh) by the electricity cost in pence per kilowatt hour. So in Dundee it would cost 40 x 15p plus 38p, equal to £6.38 – still fantastic value for a charge that will take you up to 150 miles.
But Stobart acknowledges the issues facing both the manufacturers and councils. “The major concern is always trip hazard. When you run the cable down the gutter then up to your car, there’s still a trip hazard. There’s also issues for the elderly or disabled. The cables can be quite heavy, and you have to get them out of the boot and attached to the car.”
Edit
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/oct/05/elec...
Lamp-post charging
There are 700,000 lamp-posts in London alone, and about 7.5m across the country, all handily connected to electricity and right outside our homes. Is retrofitting them with plug-in points the way forward? According to Richard Stobart of Char.gy, one of the firms handed £37m in grants by the Department of Transport to develop new charging schemes, the standard lamp-post is connected to a 25 amp supply. If they have gone over to LED, then that leaves 24 amps for charging cars. “You will be able to get around 20 miles of driving for every hour of charging at a lamp-post,” says Stobart. Electric cars don’t have to be charged up every night – Stobart charges his Renault Zoe once a week – so in an ideal world, one lamp-post could charge many cars each week, especially in cities where mileage tends to be relatively low.
Last November Char.gy set up the first 50 lamp-post charging points in London in a deal with Southwark council, while in February Siemens/Ubitricity began installing 210 in Richmond upon Thames. It costs about £1,000 to add a charging point to a lamp-post.
Many charging points were free at first, but charges have now crept in. For example, in Dundee they have been free, but from November the cost will be 15p/kWh, plus a connection fee of 38p. The latest Nissan Leaf comes with 40kWh battery, and to work out the cost of “filling up”, you multiply the size of battery (kWh) by the electricity cost in pence per kilowatt hour. So in Dundee it would cost 40 x 15p plus 38p, equal to £6.38 – still fantastic value for a charge that will take you up to 150 miles.
But Stobart acknowledges the issues facing both the manufacturers and councils. “The major concern is always trip hazard. When you run the cable down the gutter then up to your car, there’s still a trip hazard. There’s also issues for the elderly or disabled. The cables can be quite heavy, and you have to get them out of the boot and attached to the car.”
Trip hazard is an interesting problem.
It would be incredible though, if the same species who managed to put a man on the moon just fifty six years after the first unmanned flight, was defeated in their similarly spectacular guided evolution of the car, as no solution could be found to "disabled and elderly" tripping over cables.
Then again, after hundreds of years, we've also yet to discover intelligent life at local councils who will presumably be overseeing any such process.
It would be incredible though, if the same species who managed to put a man on the moon just fifty six years after the first unmanned flight, was defeated in their similarly spectacular guided evolution of the car, as no solution could be found to "disabled and elderly" tripping over cables.
Then again, after hundreds of years, we've also yet to discover intelligent life at local councils who will presumably be overseeing any such process.
Anyone thought about Vandalism yet ?
Wires hanging out everwhere?
Surely we need 'Charging Mats' built into the Tarmac.
I'd love to get that contract !
But I guess the Train and Prison operators will !
Every single road in the UK dug up.
It'll be 1000 times worse than Cable TV going in.
Look at the footpaths now, still patchwork.
Wires hanging out everwhere?
Surely we need 'Charging Mats' built into the Tarmac.
I'd love to get that contract !
But I guess the Train and Prison operators will !
Every single road in the UK dug up.
It'll be 1000 times worse than Cable TV going in.
Look at the footpaths now, still patchwork.
There’s nothing stopping you whacking charging points on lamp posts, other than the wiring. Yes, the lamp post has 240v, but the wiring is designed to power a light (0.1 kW) not charge a car (3 - 100 kW).
If you want to charge cars from lampposts at scale, you’ve got to lay new (much bigger) wires to them. Councils may have laid these in massive ducts, but mostly they are in skinny little pipes. So you have to dig up the street to lay cables. If you have to do that, you might as well lay in proper charging points, rather than a compromise lamp post solution.
If you want to charge cars from lampposts at scale, you’ve got to lay new (much bigger) wires to them. Councils may have laid these in massive ducts, but mostly they are in skinny little pipes. So you have to dig up the street to lay cables. If you have to do that, you might as well lay in proper charging points, rather than a compromise lamp post solution.
I think the difficult problem isn't the technical one but the social one. Having seen what happens on a typical road with no off-street parking, I'd expect the following:
One family who have decided a particular lamp post is "their" charging point and leave their cars parked next to it at all times. A guy with some crappy 15 year-old Vectra who has decided to launch a one-man crusade against electric vehicles and does his best to block any charging points. Someone who drives their car once a fortnight but leaves it parked next to the charging point "just in case". One person who's rigged up an enormous extension cable halfway down the street, probably looped over at least one car leaving a nice scratch. And that's before you add the nursery or school round the corner which has no staff parking or charging points...
One promising solution looks to be bollard-type structures which can hold two charging points, and therefore be placed one for every two parking spaces, meaning at least nobody is fighting over the few spaces in which you can charge.
One family who have decided a particular lamp post is "their" charging point and leave their cars parked next to it at all times. A guy with some crappy 15 year-old Vectra who has decided to launch a one-man crusade against electric vehicles and does his best to block any charging points. Someone who drives their car once a fortnight but leaves it parked next to the charging point "just in case". One person who's rigged up an enormous extension cable halfway down the street, probably looped over at least one car leaving a nice scratch. And that's before you add the nursery or school round the corner which has no staff parking or charging points...
One promising solution looks to be bollard-type structures which can hold two charging points, and therefore be placed one for every two parking spaces, meaning at least nobody is fighting over the few spaces in which you can charge.
Already trialed in London.
Generally the concept is relatively sound. There is a lot of spare capacity on the lamp post circuits (in many areas, not all). The lamp post chargers are also <13amp so around 3kw, not too much. The capacity can also be better managed if they're load balanced as even 3kw is more than enough if topping up overnight or regular trickle charging.
The fitment of a "dumb" socket is straightforward, but relies on a dedicated cable to do the metering/authentication/payment (Ubitricity) - this is what current trials have done. The alternative is to install smart sockets into each lamp post which is currently cost prohibitive as the utilisation of lamp post chargers is miniscule since the spaces are just as likely to be used by a non-charging EV or an ICE.
The trip hazard is obviously an issue where the lamp post is set far back from the curb. The other build on this idea is "pop up"/flap sockets in the pavement or in the curb, using the same dumb socket/smart cable technology, connected to the existing lamp post network, but removing the issue of trailing cables from the pavement. The cost to install these is obviously somewhat more than the lamp post ones which can be fitted in less than an hour and don't cost a lot.
We'll try a lot of different solutions, with research grants and investment, then the ones that work best will survive commercial roll-out.
As I mention though, a lot of these are the sort of thing that make sense and actually work well from a business case point of view once >50% of cars on the road/parking are EV, and we're still a good 15-20 years away from that so subsidies and small pilots will be required until then.
Generally the concept is relatively sound. There is a lot of spare capacity on the lamp post circuits (in many areas, not all). The lamp post chargers are also <13amp so around 3kw, not too much. The capacity can also be better managed if they're load balanced as even 3kw is more than enough if topping up overnight or regular trickle charging.
The fitment of a "dumb" socket is straightforward, but relies on a dedicated cable to do the metering/authentication/payment (Ubitricity) - this is what current trials have done. The alternative is to install smart sockets into each lamp post which is currently cost prohibitive as the utilisation of lamp post chargers is miniscule since the spaces are just as likely to be used by a non-charging EV or an ICE.
The trip hazard is obviously an issue where the lamp post is set far back from the curb. The other build on this idea is "pop up"/flap sockets in the pavement or in the curb, using the same dumb socket/smart cable technology, connected to the existing lamp post network, but removing the issue of trailing cables from the pavement. The cost to install these is obviously somewhat more than the lamp post ones which can be fitted in less than an hour and don't cost a lot.
We'll try a lot of different solutions, with research grants and investment, then the ones that work best will survive commercial roll-out.
As I mention though, a lot of these are the sort of thing that make sense and actually work well from a business case point of view once >50% of cars on the road/parking are EV, and we're still a good 15-20 years away from that so subsidies and small pilots will be required until then.
Possible but there are some questions, how many can plug in per lampost and also will it be intelligent enough to know which car requires the most charge as I know full EV owners get the hump when spaces are taken by Hybrids when of course they could just use the ICE to get about.
Still sounds to me that the old 32a 7kW charging issue will rear it's head here - otherwise charging a Tesla from 0-100% will take 11hrs plus. So great for topping up, not so great for you if you decide you want to buy a Model 3 and have no Supercharger points or the ability to charge "off street"
Still sounds to me that the old 32a 7kW charging issue will rear it's head here - otherwise charging a Tesla from 0-100% will take 11hrs plus. So great for topping up, not so great for you if you decide you want to buy a Model 3 and have no Supercharger points or the ability to charge "off street"
mickyh7 said:
Anyone thought about Vandalism yet ?
Wires hanging out everwhere?
Surely we need 'Charging Mats' built into the Tarmac.
I'd love to get that contract !
But I guess the Train and Prison operators will !
Every single road in the UK dug up.
It'll be 1000 times worse than Cable TV going in.
Look at the footpaths now, still patchwork.
So in this post you've imagined a problem, then become enraged by your own imaginary solution to it?Wires hanging out everwhere?
Surely we need 'Charging Mats' built into the Tarmac.
I'd love to get that contract !
But I guess the Train and Prison operators will !
Every single road in the UK dug up.
It'll be 1000 times worse than Cable TV going in.
Look at the footpaths now, still patchwork.
I mean you might be right of course, but I'm a bit frightened to ask what it has to do with "train and prison operators" though.
I think that most street lights run on an un-metered supply.
The councils and energy suppliers know how much energy is going to be used by a set of street lamps as they're switched on for a set amount of time each night (season depending) hence no need for these to be metered and a set bill is established based on an agreed, un-metered tariff.
Installing charge points to street lights would mean that they would have to be metered to confirm the new consumption and pattern.
It's a good idea, but it would take much more planning than simply installing charge points.
The councils and energy suppliers know how much energy is going to be used by a set of street lamps as they're switched on for a set amount of time each night (season depending) hence no need for these to be metered and a set bill is established based on an agreed, un-metered tariff.
Installing charge points to street lights would mean that they would have to be metered to confirm the new consumption and pattern.
It's a good idea, but it would take much more planning than simply installing charge points.
My prediction is that within the next 10 years we will have electric cars that can hold 1000+ mile range and be capable of fully charging in a matter of minutes.
You'll just need to pop to a charge station once a month for a charge and there will be no need for on street / home charging.
This is why I believe there's such a lack of investment into the charging 'infrastructure'.
You'll just need to pop to a charge station once a month for a charge and there will be no need for on street / home charging.
This is why I believe there's such a lack of investment into the charging 'infrastructure'.
ElectricSoup said:
Interesting to read, obviously not surprised someone got there first!Fleshing out the idea sufficient to patent it did seem unlikely anyway, given my understanding of car batteries is that they are basically small boxes with magic inside them, made by Elon Musk inside a collapsed Volcano just outside Thailand where he keeps a solitary vigil, only to emerge periodically to accuse rescue workers of being pedophiles.
Genuine question, when you lock a BEV that's plugged in (or a PHEV for that matter), is the connector somehow locked in?
Can see a problem where you park up at close to zero range, with the intent to charge overnight, and either a) kids, b) drunks at kicking out time or c) forementioned "CRUSADE AGAINST EV MAN" comes and disconnects you - leaving you close to where you began in terms of charge the next morning?
Then the inevitable energy density and potential for transfer point comes up again - with a fossil fuel, go and effectively 'charge' up to 100kw/h in 5 mins at the filling station and you're off - no such luck with a BEV though?
Can see a problem where you park up at close to zero range, with the intent to charge overnight, and either a) kids, b) drunks at kicking out time or c) forementioned "CRUSADE AGAINST EV MAN" comes and disconnects you - leaving you close to where you began in terms of charge the next morning?
Then the inevitable energy density and potential for transfer point comes up again - with a fossil fuel, go and effectively 'charge' up to 100kw/h in 5 mins at the filling station and you're off - no such luck with a BEV though?
croissant said:
My prediction is that within the next 10 years we will have electric cars that can hold 1000+ mile range and be capable of fully charging in a matter of minutes.
You'll just need to pop to a charge station once a month for a charge and there will be no need for on street / home charging.
This is why I believe there's such a lack of investment into the charging 'infrastructure'.
Further in to the future, we won't own and keep vehicles at home, rather there'll be self-driving vehicles stored at central charging locations over night and called to your door when you need one by pressing a button in an app. You tell the app your destination when you call the car, it'll send you the one with the necessary range in the batteries. When you get there, it'll sod of again to be recharged, and you'll summon the next one when you need it. Pay by use. I guess we'll all have to keep our Werthers by the front door.You'll just need to pop to a charge station once a month for a charge and there will be no need for on street / home charging.
This is why I believe there's such a lack of investment into the charging 'infrastructure'.
croissant said:
My prediction is that within the next 10 years we will have electric cars that can hold 1000+ mile range and be capable of fully charging in a matter of minutes.
You'll just need to pop to a charge station once a month for a charge and there will be no need for on street / home charging.
This is why I believe there's such a lack of investment into the charging 'infrastructure'.
I'm not sure I agree with your prediction, I don't know the basis of it, but I think it makes absolute sense that uncertainty about the limits (or lack in your opinion) with the technology will make it difficult or unwise, to invest in infrastructure development. You'll just need to pop to a charge station once a month for a charge and there will be no need for on street / home charging.
This is why I believe there's such a lack of investment into the charging 'infrastructure'.
It's like when I bought loads of DVDs and sorted them in expensive wallets, then realised Netflix was a thing, and that I didn't have a DVD player.
That said you do have to invest at some point, technology will always move on, but if you get X years of service life it can be financially worth it.
Mr.Jimbo said:
Genuine question, when you lock a BEV that's plugged in (or a PHEV for that matter), is the connector somehow locked in?
Can see a problem where you park up at close to zero range, with the intent to charge overnight, and either a) kids, b) drunks at kicking out time or c) forementioned "CRUSADE AGAINST EV MAN" comes and disconnects you - leaving you close to where you began in terms of charge the next morning?
Then the inevitable energy density and potential for transfer point comes up again - with a fossil fuel, go and effectively 'charge' up to 100kw/h in 5 mins at the filling station and you're off - no such luck with a BEV though?
Yes, it's lockable both ends.Can see a problem where you park up at close to zero range, with the intent to charge overnight, and either a) kids, b) drunks at kicking out time or c) forementioned "CRUSADE AGAINST EV MAN" comes and disconnects you - leaving you close to where you began in terms of charge the next morning?
Then the inevitable energy density and potential for transfer point comes up again - with a fossil fuel, go and effectively 'charge' up to 100kw/h in 5 mins at the filling station and you're off - no such luck with a BEV though?
Generally the sequence is plug in and start charging, the car side locks, and the socket side locks (most public sockets have locking pins).
The car side will not unlock until you unlock the car and release the cable.
The socket side on many public chargers will unlock when the charge event has finished (either fully charged or a fault). This makes sense as it allows a car parked next to you to then unplug your cable and plug theirs in if you're overstaying beyond the charge.
With regards to "ending up with no charge" most cars via the app can be set to alert you if a charge event stops (e.g. due to a fault). While it doesn't prevent a fault from occuring, at least you'll be notified that the car is no longer charging.
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