Roland Perry wrote:
29 May 2008, Dan Sheppard remarked:
Surely there are already metal poles in the ground wired for
electricity in many car parks? You'd need thicker cabling to each of
these new "poles", and many more circuits back to a substation, but I
don't think this is going to be as much as a problem as the capacity
issues further up.

I don't recall seeing any. There's the lighting, of course, but that's
orders of magnitude too low capacity for this.

I'm not sure where you're coming from with this problem of getting the
power to the poles. I thought you were saying that the civil
engineering of such was complex and irritating? I thought that
lighting poles would have similar challenges (though admittedly, doing
this at medium voltages would be a little more challenging).

TNP seems to think a 300 place car park is the same as a small factory,
but I'm sceptical he hasn't dropped a zero somewhere.

I'm no expert on small factories, really, so I'm not sure. But I'm not
sure what difference that makes because if you plonk a small factory
where every carpark is, you've got a vastly changed energy landscape
anyway.

Perhaps it would make more sense to feed these poles at, say, 11kV and
give them each 1/3A. You may want to transform that down in each pole,
or else provide a safety interlock in the connector.

That'll be good to stop people stealing the power for their houses, but
doesn't sound very "all weather" to me.

I dunno, I'm sure the eggheads could sort something out with the
connector: it doesn't have to be an exposed prong plug, after all.
Could be something closer to a petrol pump connector with a flower
like thing on the end, furled up (and earthed) when exposed, but then
activated by an occluded nobble in the pipe which causes the outer
casing to unfurl.

But, why are we doing this again?

So we drive more than 5 miles a day in an electric car

That seems like a bit of a pointless occupation to me.

Dan.