UK’s first all-electric avenue charges vehicles through street lamps

"Electric Avenue" now has 24 streetlamp charging posts to top up electric vehicles overnight

Spotted: Recently christened “Electric Avenue”, a street in the City of Westminster, London, is the first UK street to place EV charging points within street lamps.

Siemens and Ubitricity installed the technology in existing streetlamp columns, using already-available infrastructure to prevent the digging up of roads and laying of new cables.

A SmartCable connects the streetlamp to battery-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. The number of kilowatt-hours used is then registered by an in-cable meter box and at the end, the customer is billed accordingly, allowing drivers without garages to top up their electric vehicles overnight.

Berlin-based company Ubitricity has been converting London’s streetlamps to charging points since 2015. Having collaborated with Siemens, there are now over 1,300 installed across the city. Whilst Electric Avenue is reported to be the first residential avenue in the UK to have fully converted its streetlamps, the two adjoining roads are also due to be transformed in the coming weeks, and London is expecting to have a thousand charging points within the next year.

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