For city denizens who’d love to buy an electric vehicle—but live in buildings with no driveway or garage—the lack of practical charging options remains a daunting barrier. For charging companies, pricey urban real estate and prohibitive installation costs can make DC chargers a non-starter.
Voltpost is among companies who see curbside charging as the solution to both problems. The company can retrofit an existing lamppost into a Level 2 charger in one to two hours, at a fraction of the cost of installing direct-current units. Those chargers can send 7.6 kilowatts to EVs, perfect for overnight fill-ups or other longer stints at the curb.
Jeff Prosserman, Voltpost’s CEO, was inspired to co-found the company after buying an EV in Brooklyn during the pandemic, enduring far-flung treks to electric oases in a charging desert.
“We recognized that nobody was going to go from gas to electric without better charger access,” Prosserman says. “We saw an opportunity to make charging as ubiquitous as a common lamppost, and a revenue-generating asset.”
Through a partnership with AT&T, Voltpost will install Internet-connected chargers in Michigan and metropolitan Detroit—a city whose revitalization has included 65,000 LED streetlights, after years of notorious nighttime darkness.
The sleek silver units feature a pair of 20-foot-long (6.1 meter) cables, enough to reach two vehicles parked along a curb or side-by-side in parking lots. The cords unlock via a user’s phone app, and retract to avoid vandalism, weather exposure, or trip hazards. Initial models feature JC1772 plugs, but the chargers can easily accommodate the Tesla-based North American Charging Standard (NACS) that will soon become a de facto industry standard.
The modular units can support 5G rollouts, including in densely populated cities. Those connections allow users to upload software and other updates to EVs, and to maximize charger uptime by monitoring their health.
“Ultimately, today’s cars are computers, so that lets us future-proof and provide additional services over time,” such as grid management or urban air-quality sensing, Prosserman says.
Best of all, the chargers offer low upfront costs for cities or private hosts: Roughly $25,000. Their installation requires no costly digging or trench work, which can quickly boost costs into the six figures. Some existing streetlights need to be upgraded from 110- to 220-volt power, but that’s still a relatively quick fix.
“It’s the most streamlined, cost-effective way of getting chargers into a built environment,” according to Prosserman.
The business model lets site hosts—which can be a city, utility, university, or private company—set their own variable rates for electricity. That could include free juice for residents or employees, or reduced rates overnight.
Potential downsides remain as numerous as the cars that jostle over every square inch of public space in big cities. For one, what will prevent owners from ICE-ing EVs, the term for fossil-fueled drivers who occupy parking spaces meant for charging? Experts say potential fixes include setting aside street spaces exclusively for EVs, with human enforcement or even camera sensors to generate automated tickets or other disincentives.
Beyond Voltpost’s efforts, New York has installed 100 curbside chargers via a pilot program through local utility Con Edison, and is targeting 10,000 chargers on streets by 2030. Drivers are paying US $2.50 an hour for those fill-ups, or $1 per hour overnight. City officials say those Level-2 chargers have been remarkably reliable and popular, with 99.9-percent uptime and usage for as much as 80 percent of each day; with about 34-percent usage overall.
City dwellers who own an EV could get more charging options if programs to add charging capabilities to lampposts flourish.Voltpost
Yet nothing comes cheap in New York: The city spent $13.4 million to install a mere 100 chargers. That’s $134,000 for every Level- 2 plug—far more than a homeowner would pay, even taking into account the greater requirements for the municipal systems.
Voltpost is now seeking a share of a $15 million federal grant to fund 500 additional outlets in all five boroughs of New York City, with half of those sited in low-income or disadvantaged neighborhoods. Prosserman says the company could install about 600 chargers with that much funding. That $15 million grant is part of the Biden administration’s $521 million in charger funding in 29 states, the District of Columbia and eight Native American Tribes. Voltpost has installed two chargers in New York City through another pilot program, and has contracts to install more than 100 in the states of New York, Michigan and Illinois.
Similar projects are sprouting up in other U.S. cities, and in Europe. In Germany, industrial giant Rheinmetall is testing a “curb stone charger” in Cologne. The chargers deliver up to 22 kilowatts, a robust flow by Level 2 standards, enough to add about 50 to 80 kilometers of range per hour. Rheinmetall estimates German drivers will need about 1 million public charging posts by 2030. Boston’s zero-emission vehicle goals include having every resident within a five-minute walk from an EV charger, including curbside outlets.
The company Itselectric has an answer to the age-old “Who’s going to pay for this?” question. The Brooklyn-based startup handles permitting, installation and maintenance of a curbside charger that’s roughly the size of a parking meter. Property owners would earn passive income from sharing charger revenue, which the company estimates at an annual minimum of $1,000 per charger. Company executives insist each charger would cost less than $10,000 to install, using the same 220-volt service already available in most buildings. Itselectric plans to deploy hundreds of chargers in Boston over five years, and to expand into Los Angeles and Jersey City, N.J.
Source: spectrumieee
