Dublin’s Lord Mayor Ray McAdam made headlines this week calling on the Minister for Climate, Environment and Energy to reform Ireland’s private wires legislation. The goal? Allowing inner city residents without driveways to charge their electric vehicles safely from their own homes using on-street solutions. It is, on its face, a reasonable and welcome call. The problem is that it is also only half the conversation.
The Problem Is Real
Anyone who has spent time in the older neighbourhoods of Dublin, whether it’s Stoneybatter, the Liberties, or Phibsborough, will know the situation immediately. Houses open directly onto the street. No front garden, no driveway, no garage. If you park at night, you park on the road outside. And if you want to charge an EV from home, you currently cannot, at least not legally or safely.
The Lord Mayor’s press release specifically references cross-pavement cable solutions already being trialled in cities like Plymouth, where discreet channels are built into the pavement to allow residents to run a charging cable from their front door to their car without creating a trip hazard. It is a logical stepping stone, and the legislative barrier he identifies around private wires rules is a genuine one that needs addressing.
So far, so sensible.
Meanwhile, Somewhere in Cologne, a Tank Manufacturer Solved This More Elegantly
Here is where things get interesting. While Dublin debates legislation and Plymouth lays cable channels into pavements, Rheinmetall, a German company better known for making armaments and engine blocks, quietly ran a year-long pilot of something rather clever in Cologne. It is called the Curb Charger, and it does exactly what the name suggests: it integrates EV charging electronics directly into a standard kerbstone.
The unit, weighing around 80 kilograms and constructed from stainless steel and aluminium, delivers up to 22 kilowatts of power through a 400V three-phase connection. It sits flush with the pavement. There are no bollards, no poles, no ugly street furniture. Drivers bring their own Type 2 cable, plug in at the kerb, and charge. A smartphone app, QR code, or RFID card activates the charger.
The engineering is genuinely impressive. IP68-rated encapsulated electronics, sealed charging sockets with integrated water drains, a water level sensor that cuts power if flooding threatens safe operation, and both a cooling system for summer heat and a built-in heater to keep it functional in sub-zero temperatures. The modular design means a faulty unit can be swapped out in minutes via what Rheinmetall calls CurbSwap, minimising downtime.
The results from Cologne were not just encouraging, they were remarkable. Four units completed over 2,800 successful charging cycles across a year, with technical availability exceeding 99%. Users rated the system 4.38 out of 5, with older participants giving particularly positive feedback. The main criticism? The charger was so discreet that some users found it hard to spot, which is arguably a problem most urban infrastructure would love to have.
Serial production has now started, with unit costs in the four-digit euro range, and Rheinmetall has confirmed orders from several German metropolitan areas.
The point is not that Dublin needs to immediately adopt the Rheinmetall system specifically. The point is that solutions like this already exist and are proven at scale. The legislative framework the Lord Mayor is rightly pushing for would enable exactly this kind of infrastructure to be piloted here.
The Gap Nobody in That Press Release Mentioned
Here is where the Lord Mayor’s otherwise sensible call falls short. Read the statement carefully and you will notice something missing.
It speaks, correctly, about terraced homes in Ballybough and Phibsborough whose residents park on the street. But what about the person renting a flat above a shop on Capel Street? Or the apartment dweller in a purpose-built block in Grangegorman who does not own a parking space, let alone one with a charging point?
There is no mention of apartment dwellers in the press release. None. Not even an acknowledgement that this is a separate but equally urgent problem. Dublin is a city of renters and flat dwellers, and for many of them the path to EV ownership is blocked not by the absence of driveway charging, but by the absence of any charging point at all within their building.
Landlords in Ireland currently face no obligation and, more to the point, no meaningful incentive to install EV charging in their car parks or communal parking areas. Until that changes, a significant portion of Dublin’s population simply cannot become EV owners in any practical sense, regardless of what happens to private wires legislation.
This is not an impossible problem. Several European countries have introduced right-to-charge legislation that gives tenants the right to request a charger installation from their landlord, with costs typically passed through in a manageable way. Others have introduced tax relief or grant schemes to incentivise landlords to install charging infrastructure proactively, before demand forces the issue. Ireland could look to either model, or both.
Enthusiasm Is Not Enough
None of this is to say the Lord Mayor is wrong to push for what he is pushing for. The private wires legislation is a real barrier, and fixing it would help real people in real Dublin streets. It deserves to be addressed.
But a press release that speaks passionately about “ensuring the transition to electric vehicles works for everyone” whilst making no mention of the city’s flat-dwelling, renting population is not quite delivering on that promise. Street-level kerb charging matters. Legislative reform matters. Landlord incentives and tenant rights matter too. These things are not in competition; they all need to happen, and it would be encouraging to see them all named in the same breath.
Rheinmetall managed to turn a kerbstone into a smart charger that survived a Cologne winter at 99% uptime. Dublin can probably manage to write a few more paragraphs of housing policy.
