Using street lamps as EV chargers

The paper is here, but unfortunately this government funded research is not open access.

https://doi.org/10.1061/JUPDDM.UPENG-5865

I thought this was mostly about what kind of chargers are in there. But since the paper is not available, I guess we don't even know that.

I guess an open question (at least for me) is whether, in an urban setting, it's better to install a dozen fast chargers, or hundreds of slower chargers – like two for all 100 street lamps in an area.

What's more useful? Particularly in areas where people do drive a bit (the school run, shopping, whatever) but don't drive that much (they use transit, no huge daily commutes).

For me (apartment, shared garage, hard to adapt) I guess a more easily available but slower charger that replenishes the few kms that I drive every other day during a night seems more useful than scheduling a couple hours on fast charger on the supermarket… just to get there and find it's unavailable.

But they only installed 30 chargers, so it'll be hard to draw conclusions.

Another aspect I'd wonder about is the cost for whatever organization is responsible for maintaining lamps in a district, presumably a slower charger is a lower specification and would be cheaper and more likely to be widely fitted or for the project to be approved in the first place, and limits the demands on the local electrical infrastructure. Once the initial install is done in a lamp it would seem that upgrading in future would be a smaller hurdle.

Pricing always seems to be ignored. Sure, my local council installed chargers in the village car park for people without off street parking, but that’s 50p/kWh compared to 8p for me charging at home.

This. The big inequity around being able to charge at home is the huge difference in price. These slow overnight chargers need to be very cheap to move the needle on EV accessibility.