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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

> that means a charger every roughly 10 meters. Imagine the amount of copper necessary to cover that.

I can imagine streetlights existing so it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch from there

Even crazier, there was a time where someone proposed running at least one copper pair to every home just so people could talk to each other over long distances. Two wires per home! That's impossible.

On one side of my street there are 4 streetlights and 16 cars parked almost at all times (At least from September to July, the only time you can find a parking space is early morning).

Would that be enough? The streetlights are LED so I don't think they use too much electricity to justify a massive cable that could charge 16 cars

Likely when built the streetlights weren't LED, so the buried cables are under-capacity. Assuming they can provide 230v power at 15-20 amps, that's enough to fully charge something like a Tesla or Chevy bolt (250-300 mile range) overnight.

Most people could do fine with charging only 1 out of every 4 nights for regular commuting, the tricky part is just figuring out how to make that work logistically, but it is at least feasible. Those with schedules that allow charging during the day make things easier I'd assume.

Of course they're under capacity, but it's not that expensive to replace and upgrade the cables to be able to support a couple standard car charger sockets - just do it when someone else rips up the road anyway.

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