- Michigan’s first lamppost charger is now live.
- Voltpost, a New York-based startup, made that happen.
- The company’s solution is to retrofit existing street light poles with a modular EV charger.
Voltpost’s first publicly available lamppost charger for electric vehicles in Michigan is now online. It’s a big moment for the four-year-old New York-based startup founded with a big idea: turn regular old street lights into EV chargers.
The startup’s solution is to retrofit existing lampposts with its modular Level 2 charger, so that any city street in the world can offer EV charging without costly infrastructure upgrades or bulky hardware.
The lamppost EV charger can have up to four retractable cables.
Photo by: Voltpost
Voltpost’s first Michigan installation can be found at the American Center for Mobility’s campus in Ypsilanti Township, near Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan. This is just the beginning, though, with 11 more installations due to go online later this year at several strategic locations in the Detroit are. Last week, the startup also turned on its first-ever publicly available lamppost charger in Oak Park, Illinois.
“Deploying this charger is a meaningful step toward making EV charging more accessible and equitable for all communities,” said Jeffrey Prosserman, CEO and co-founder of Voltpost. “ACM’s testbed provides the perfect proving ground to launch Voltpost Michigan. This collaboration lays the groundwork for a cleaner, more connected mobility future in Detroit, the nation’s epicenter of transportation innovation.”
The lamppost EV charger can be installed in under an hour, according to its maker, and each unit can power two or four EVs at once via integrated cables. That said, it’s worth noting that the stalls rely on the public lighting infrastructure, which was not designed to sustain high loads. In other words, don’t expect lightning-fast charging speeds when hooked up to a lamppost charger.
This is strictly a Level 2 type of thing, but it can still be plenty useful if an EV is parked for several hours. Going to a movie and parking on the street? Just plug into a street light charger. Meanwhile, municipalities can quickly retrofit existing lampposts with Voltpost’s unit without having to spend a fortune on DC fast charging infrastructure–although that’s needed, too.
Voltpost was founded in 2021, and last year, it partnered with telecom giant AT&T to turn Detroit’s lampposts into internet-connected EV chargers. Thanks to AT&T’s wireless data services, Voltpost can remotely monitor chargers and detect malfunctions.