Turning Streetlights Into EV Charging Stations

Owning an EV in a dense urban city is challenging. Most people don’t have their own garages and so they park on the street or in large parking garages. We do the latter.

About five or six years ago, I walked into our parking garage and saw that the garage operator had installed a ChargePoint charging station in the garage.I literally walked back across the street to our apartment and bought our first EV. We now own three.

But charging with ChargePoint is not ideal. There are a limited number of these charging stations in our parking garage and more and more EVs. They are often filled up. And the rates that ChargePoint supplies electricity at are borderline gouging. They have a monopoly on our garage and price accordingly. I believe the rate we pay in our parking garage in NYC is literally double the rate we buy electricity from ConEdison in our NYC appointment.

In our homes in Los Angeles and Long Island we charge off our solar panels on our roofs and basically don’t pay to charge our EVs other than the depreciation on the solar installation costs. That is absolutely the way to go if you can afford the cost of a solar installation.

But back to dense urban areas like NYC. If we want more EVs and less gas powered cars on our streets, we need better charging infrastructure.

In Paris, where we have been for the last few days, they are trying an experiment with putting EV charging stations on street lights.

If the city makes those curb locations only available for charging and not parking, that could be a great option for encouraging more city dwellers to buy or rent EVs.

I believe the availability of charging options, whether it is a rational fear or not, is holding back a lot of people from moving from gas to electric. So anything that can change that dynamic is a good thing in my view.