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The Voltpost can also be designed to attenuate the specter of accidents involving charging cords and passersby. For one, the port for its retractable cable is mounted about 8 ft off the bottom, minimizing the danger that low-slung cables will change into tripping or snagging hazards for passing vehicles, vans, buses, bicyclists, pedestrians, or wheelchair customers.
Voltpost additionally designed the form of its charging deal with with security in thoughts. Standard charging handles appear to be gun-shaped gasoline station dispensers and “stick out nearly a foot into site visitors,” Mairo stated, making them susceptible to being clipped by passing automobiles. Voltpost’s patent-pending plug deal with appears extra like a massive glowing doorknob with a wire that extends from it at a 90-degree angle to lie flat towards the automotive it’s plugged into, lowering the danger of unintentional snagging.
Even probably the most considerate and tamper-proof designs can’t guard towards 100 % of the harm that will happen, Mairo famous — that’s why Voltpost says it has additionally made its tech straightforward to restore.
The Voltpost system consists of 4 aluminum-shielded quadrants that clip onto a collar mounted to the sunshine submit, which permits set up in lower than an hour for a extensive number of pole styles and sizes, Mairo stated. It additionally permits broken or malfunctioning quadrants to be eliminated and changed with new ones, which is a lot sooner and simpler than “having somebody come out and do on-site repairs,” he stated.
As for letting EV drivers know the place to search out its chargers, Voltpost has a cellular app and net interface to handle location, reservation, and fee providers — an more and more normal characteristic for EV charging networks. The startup has additionally designed a back-end software program system to trace charger efficiency and standing and supply different help for the town governments or electrical utilities that make up Voltpost’s buyer base.
Some cities personal and function their very own streetlights, whereas others lease them from electrical utilities which are accountable for sustaining and working them. For both class of buyer, Voltpost plans to bundle its {hardware}, set up, software program, and upkeep prices right into a easy subscription charge and to let the town or utility determine the way it desires to cost EV drivers, arrange reservation programs, handle fee strategies, and in any other case run them to satisfy their specific targets.
To date, Voltpost has raised $5 million of personal funding, together with a $3.6 million seed financing final yr led by RWE Energy Transition Investments, the enterprise arm of German utility and vitality firm RWE. Other traders embrace Good News Ventures, Climate Capital, Twynam Funds Management, and the Exelon Foundation, the nonprofit arm of U.S. utility firm Exelon.
Mixing and matching the city EV-charging choices
Curbside charging isn’t the one type of EV charging that cities will want, in fact. At Voltpost’s San Francisco occasion final week, Mairo shared the stage with Jake Potent, director of public coverage and authorities relations for Revel, a New York City–based mostly startup that’s change into the largest supplier of high-speed EV charging in New York City behind Tesla, largely to serve its all-EV rideshare fleet.
Rideshare drivers who must cost rapidly, and infrequently, are superb anchor clients to help the excessive value of constructing EV charging in dense city environments, Potent stated. But “we’re by no means going to construct out sufficient quick charging for everybody” driving an EV in New York City or in San Francisco, the place the startup is planning its subsequent enlargement.
Henna Trewn, a program manager for the San Francisco Environment Department, agreed that cities want a mixture of fast-charging and slow-charging choices to assist residents make the change to EVs. Other U.S. cities deploying curbside charging embrace Boston, Chicago, and Seattle.
San Francisco is exploring choices for curbside charging however faces competing pressures in terms of choosing the right mixture of charging choices, Trewn stated. “We’re a very congested metropolis and have very restricted parking. There’s a excessive demand for curb area,” she stated. “How will we show that doing one thing there may be future-proofing for the demand to come?”
Voltpost’s modular design could give cities extra choices to adapt to modifications within the fast-evolving EV charging panorama, Mairo stated, similar to the continued shift amongst EV- charger producers and automakers from the combined-charging-system normal to the North America Charging Standard developed by Tesla.
The identical modularity can enable Voltpost’s product to do issues apart from charging vehicles. That might embrace serving as mobile repeater stations — the corporate is in discussions with 5G carriers, Mairo stated, although he declined to offer extra particulars — or as sensor platforms for numerous “good metropolis” providers, a a lot hyped alternative for incomes cash from information collected from digital infrastructure, together with LED streetlights themselves.
But proper now the agency is concentrated on getting its newly unveiled EV charging tech into as many gentle posts as it may possibly — beginning first with Chicago, Detroit, and New York, the place it hopes to start out deploying on some metropolis streets later this yr.
