With more than 40% of UK homes lacking a driveway, lamp-post chargers are billed as the solution for drivers to refuel their EVs locally. However, could reports of failing chargers and ICE car drivers being angry at losing parking bays undermine public support for them?
In July, west London’s Hounslow Council cut off the power to a number of lamp-post chargers in Chiswick after residents reported that they had stopped working.
Following an inspection, the council concluded that heavy rainfall had entered the chargers, causing them and the street lamps to which they were connected to fail.
The council has since restored power to the lamps while Ubitricity, the Shell-owned charger provider that installed the chargers, carries out repairs.
In April, residents in the same borough protested about the creation of lamp-post charging bays because they resulted in the loss of eight parking spaces for ICE cars on a street that had few EVs. The council promised to respond but didn’t reply to Autocar’s request for comment.
These aren’t the first instances of lamp-post chargers attracting negative publicity. In November last year, Portsmouth City Council disconnected 98 lamp-post and bollard-mounted chargers due to safety concerns.
The council said it had instructed provider Ubitricity to resolve the issue “as soon as possible”. However, seven months later, only 41 of those chargers had gone back online.
A spokesperson for the council said: “We hope to have restored power to the remaining chargers by the end of August.”
An Ubitricity spokesperson, commenting on the problems in both areas, said: “We are working closely with the local authorities to restore service to these areas.”
The UK has around 20,000 lamp-post chargers. They offer charging speeds of around 5kW and are provided by operators such as market leader Ubitricity and Char.gy, which installed London’s first such charger in 2018.
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There are many streets that were not designed for driveways but they have been created bt paving over front gardens. This destroys maybe two on street parking bays to accomodate a dropped curb and turn in space, yet this does not create howls of protest. Electric cars, like many of the measures to combat global warming just seem to excite a particular section of the press which prints any negative story and tries to create political conflict.
'Problems' with unused lampost charging bays could be simply solved by a rule that allows their use by ICE cars after a particular time (7pm?). A sensor/camera detecting a car parked there without the charger in use could alert local enforcment staff. This sort of thing should have been thought through and built into lampost designs from the start. It could be built into new ones now and at least trialed. The rule could create charge points on many more lamposts.
Councils also have the necessary information to charge the electricity used back to the local house owner. That way it could be deemed to be a domestic use and VAT free. I'm sure Octopus would like to get into a way of splicing it into a household bill thus ensuring this and also charging a lower start rate / off peak rate as well. The country (through its politicians?) just needs to decide what is the most efficient way of charging cars and parking ICE cars. By all means let private enterprise offer competitive implementations of that but dont let them create mini local monopolies that allow them to dictate and gouge car owners.
Longer term, one use of driverless technology could be to gather electric cars to a local car park / charging zone. Recall could be a problem without a vacant parking bay to go to it could be just like calling an Uber, just be outside when your car (without driver) turns up.
We are seeing the advent of two-teir motoring. If you can afford a hom with a drive, then you can run an EV, a) conveniently, and b) econominically. If you can only afford a home with shared or on-street parking then running an EV is, a) inconvient, and b) unecomonic vs. an ICE car (i.e. the kwh cost of a non-private charger results in an mpg worse than the cost of petrol). I think solving "b" is critical to the adotpion of EVs.
They'll be selling cars with a petrol cap till 2035, cars bought in that year will go for at least another 10 years meaning you've got till 2045. By then I have no doubt there'll be affordable 5 year old secondhand BEV's that cost a fraction of the petrol equivalent to run no matter where it's charged.
I agree, I think my point is in relation to the journey from now to then. I will not be smooth unless 'b)' is addressed.
Well said Marod, I was running a ZOE a while back on a lease that included unlimited fast charger use and since I do not have a way of charging at home and a bank of fast chargers a 5 min drive away, this worked. However, when this ended, I went back to ICE as the cost of paying for said charging was greater than the diesel I now use, make it make sense!
I can understand why people will be upset about losing parking bays, especially if they're paying for parking permits, but it is really a necessary evil that will eventually make sense, may e too soon but who knows.
At the very least the charge points should be reliable and not failing as frequently or for as long as implied in this article.
In areas of parking permits, it should surely be a simple solution: if you have a permit and buy an EV, the LA fit a lampost charger in your road free of charge, providing an additional incentive to go EV (a 'guaranteed' parking space as permitted areas are often over subscribed compared to spaces available). Thus charging bays are balanced with demand in that area, eventually every lampost has a charger.