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by jjk166 1181 days ago
There isn't additional spare capacity in the wires that were designed only to power the light. While they almost certainly are rated for a bit more juice to deal with intermittent power surges and an appropriate factor of safety for design use, you still need that buffer for any application that draws 500W, so you can't persistently run above that level.

And if you're charging when you park at home and at work, unless you find someone who works at your home and sleeps where you work, that's going to be around 2 streetlights per car, and even that's assuming 100% street parking with optimally arranged streetlights. For context, there are currently about 6 cars per streetlight in Europe, and their current total power consumption of 35 TWh/yr would be able to provide 20 miles of range per day to just 16% of that number of cars. Of course streetlights aren't normally running 24/7, but even if you triple the power usage (which the streetposts might not even be able to handle) you're still at less than half of what you'd need at a minimum. There's really no way around building substantially more charging infrastructure.