Liverpool’s solution for those who have an electric car without a garage: charge it at the lampposts

Charging the electric car if you don’t have your own garage can be a problem. It is one of the great difficulties in facilitating the adoption of this type of vehicle. Fortunately, many are aware of this limitation and are working on possible solutions. One of them is the one presents Liverpool City Council.

the english city has allied with Ubitricity for the installation of 300 charging points on the street. Some points that will be available to residents and local businesses. With this addition, the city will have a generous network of low-power public chargers, but the most interesting thing is that they will not break the aesthetics of Liverpool, as they will be integrated into the urban architecture.

Let there be light

With the alliance with Ubitricity, the city will go from 150 to 450 public chargers. These new chargers will be in locations chosen by the residents and will be installed on existing streetlights. Each charging point has a power of 5kW, 230V and its installation is really simple, taking no more than two hours for each lamppost.

The idea is that these streetlights are already connected to the city’s electrical grid. With a little play and a spliceUbitricity also makes it possible to take advantage of these points to connect the electric car.

The company, owned by Shell, explains that this method is much cheaper than installing new charging points. The points chosen will be made based on the requests of the residents, where the Liverpool City Council explains that they receive more than 10 requests a week. Despite this, visitors will also be able to use them, since they will be available for all drivers.

Ubitricity also has these electric charging points on streetlights in London, where it began testing them in 2018. Payment can be managed from the mobile charging applications and each streetlight will have a QR code for easy linking.

Streetlight charging is not a new concept. Manufacturers like BMW have been proposing it for years. Little by little the system has been consolidated and we already see that cities like Liverpool are taking it very much into account to expand their network of public chargers.

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