Electric charge in street lights, a simple solution that “travels” from the United Kingdom to Berlin

Along with other weaknesses of the electric vehicle, such as its current high price and range, which still does not satisfy everyone, the main obstacle of the electric vehicle today is the lack of a sufficient charging network. One of the reasons that explains the special backwardness of Spain in relation to other European countries is as basic as the fact that the majority of the population of our country lives in apartments and does not have a garage, and that it is more comfortable and easy to load. A car when living in one family home.

Existing infrastructure such as street lighting, accessibility for the population whose cars They are sleeping The street is an idea that has already yielded good results in London and other cities in the United Kingdom and which is now being implemented in the German capital Berlin. Ubitricity, the maker of charging solutions for electric vehicles owned by Shell Group, has won a public tender from this city to install at least 200 charging points in public lighthouses.

The poles will allow Berliners to park their cars close to home without private parking, about 60%. The first street light chargers will be installed in the Stieglitz-Zelendorf and Marzan-Hellersdorf districts, where the absence of garages is more pronounced, and will use the Heinz model, designed specifically for the German market.

Heinz chargers, developed in conjunction with ebee Smart Technologies, will be installed on a street lighting pole at the EUREF campus in Berlin to protect roads. With 3.7 kW charging capacity, they offer optimal conditions for urban charging according to the usual resident parking time.

This power is enough for a car that has been parked for eight hours to recover about 24 kWh or the same amount of energy needed to travel about 160 kilometers. Of course, an installation with these features prevents the customer from turning to the public fast charging network, at higher prices, and having to hire a car after the operation is completed.

The installation of the first 200 chargers will be coordinated with the Berlin Senate Department of Environment, Urban Mobility, Consumer Protection and Climate Action and will be implemented under a government-funded clean air project, Federal. If an already requested project extension is approved, up to 800 charging points can be installed for additional lighting poles.

Residents at Ubitricity charging points have the option of recharging at their usual rates from their power provider or using a QR code that appears on a post that operates without registration. Both options require only a standard type 2 charger cable.

The firm’s chief executive, based in Berlin, emphasized that “using existing infrastructure for public charging stations is one of the main ways in which all drivers of electric vehicles can be made available”.

For his part, Shell CEO Fabian Ziegler in Germany predicts that in the future only the fifth charging process will take place at petrol stations. “In the summer of 2021,” he recalls, “the German government decided to fight for climate neutrality by 2045.” It was an ambitious plan, but workable until all the participants came together. [Nosotros] “We want to be part of the solution and help people switch to electric vehicles and offer charging options for all occasions: at home, at work, on the road and now also overnight on utility poles.”

A good option for Spain

According to the European Statistical Office (Eurostat) 2018, filling with street lighting can be an ideal solution for a country like ours. In fact, Spain is the second country in the EU where a larger percentage of its inhabitants live in this type of building, surpassing only Latvia.

In Germany this share is 56.3%, while in Italy it is 52.6%. The differences are more pronounced if we look at our neighbors to the north, where they buy a lot of electric cars and where the house / apartment ratio is opposite than in Spain: in France, seven out of 10 people live in a house. And only three blocks; In Belgium only 22.4% live in flats, while in Ireland, a real paradise for single homes, almost 92% live in this type of housing.

Considering the average in the 27 EU countries, less than half (46%) of its population lives in flats and, consequently, more than half live in houses. This ratio is essential to understanding TroubleBecause living in a solitary home usually facilitates the installation of an indoor charger point.

To this scenario we must add another special circumstance in Spain, such as the fact that here is a percentage of cars that Sleep On the street it is about 70%, which makes it difficult to recharge at night, which is not only the most common, but also generally the cheapest. To alleviate this situation, of course, lamp chargers can.

To complete the table, we will finally make a reference to the charger installation in the community garages. From 2014, it is mandatory for all newly built homes to have pre-installed charging points for electric vehicles, and the Horizontal Property Law dictates that “installing a charging point for a vehicle for private use in the parking lot of a building is always located in a private parking lot. So far everything is right.

However, older buildings may find it more difficult to meet the stringent technical requirements required to approve this type of project, and thus the so-called. Bulletin. The electrical installation of a building depends on the expected energy demand, which in many garages of previous years was limited to just the front door, lighting and other things, and chargers are multiplying these needs so that they are expensive. Investments that many neighbors do not want to make.