Most EV charging is done at home, which tends to be a fairly simple proposition for homeowners who can set up a charger in their garage, plug their vehicle in overnight, and forget about it.
But for the millions of people in the US who live in apartments (nearly a third of US households are in multi-family housing) or in big, dense cities where at-home charging isn’t an option, the charging calculus is a little trickier.
But what if we could bring EV charging to the curb? Curbside charging, which is already common in Europe, is starting to emerge as a solution for US EV drivers.
Now, New York-based startup Voltpost is starting to scale an EV charging solution that makes use of existing infrastructure: lampposts. The company claims that its lamppost EV charging platform makes for a speedier installation process, brings down construction costs, and has the flexibility of being able to retrofit lampposts with either two or four EV chargers.
Voltpost recently had its commercial launch in Oak Park, Illinois, and then kicked off a series of 12 planned deployments in Michigan by retrofitting a lamppost in the parking lot of the American Center for Mobility in southeast Michigan. Other sites in Detroit and across the state are coming soon, according to the company.
“Voltpost is on a mission to decarbonize mobility by democratizing charging access,” Jeff Prosserman, Voltpost’s cofounder and CEO, told Tech Brew at a ribbon-cutting event for the first Michigan lamppost charger. “We do that by retrofitting streetlights into an EV charging platform.”
The deployments in Michigan are being supported by the state’s Office of Future Mobility and Electrification (OFME). Prosserman said that the funding from the state enabled Voltpost to move forward on the project at a time when a federal EV charging funding freeze has caused the startup to halt work on projects in six other states.
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“Voltpost did win a number of federal contracts for charging deployment. Those funds are currently frozen,” he said. “And we have been working with stakeholders who are connected to the disbursement of those funds in various markets.”
He noted that the funds were obligated through Congress, and expressed optimism that the funding will be unfrozen “in the second half of this year, likely tied to the budget negotiation that’s going to happen in Congress.” In the meantime, Voltpost is charging ahead on the projects for which it has other sources of funding, like in Michigan and five other states.
“The Voltpost charger is an excellent example of activating opportunities for new mobility through innovation—creating meaningful, transformative change,” Justine Johnson, OFME’s chief mobility officer, said in a statement. “Our goal is to make charging accessible for everyone, whether they live in a single-family or multi-family setting.”
Voltpost’s model involves retrofitting existing lampposts with modular, Level 2 EV chargers. EV drivers can manage charging sessions, including payment, in Voltpost’s app.
“One of the major barriers when people live in multi-family housing is that they don’t have a place to conveniently charge. It started with looking at densely populated cities and providing curbside charging access, where somebody would park where they do today…and just plug in and have that access point,” Prosserman said. “We then recognized as we continued to build the company that this solves charging not just for the curbside city environment, but for Main Street USA.”