W.hen Meinolf Pflug is strolling through a strange town with his family on vacation, he may stop suddenly to admire a rare street lamp. In contrast, there is a monoculture of light on the streets of his hometown of Dortmund. Most of the around 50,000 street lights in the urban area curve in the classic whip shape at a height of five meters above the road. 160, soon there will be twice as many, but they stand out, not only because of the bright green color with which the masts are painted. A gray box with a socket and a display is nestled around the base of the post. Lantern parkers who drive an electric car can fill up with electricity here, with an output of up to 11 kilowatts, which is equivalent to that of a wallbox at home. Pflug, civil engineer in the city’s civil engineering department, is coordinating the construction of the unusual charging network.
The tempting idea of using the cities’ already existing lighting infrastructure for the burgeoning electromobility is around ten years old. But in practice it initially seemed to fail due to solid physics. Because in many cities the street lighting depends on its own power supply, which is designed for the power requirements of the lights. Even before the switch to modern light-emitting diodes, this was only a few 100 watts per light point, so mostly single-phase cables are laid. The lighting networks, in turn, only carry electricity at night. In the past, the luminaires could not be switched on individually from a distance, this is changing with modernization. The street lights in Dortmund are mainly controlled digitally via a meshed WLAN. This can also be used to handle the communication between the charging device, which is required, among other things, for the payment processes.
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