This article is part of a series sharing the stories of startups developing innovative solutions to environmental challenges and how they are pushing their business forward even as the Trump Administration champions fossil fuels and slashes funding for green projects. Read all the stories here.
Voltpost, as its name suggests, retrofits lampposts so that they also are electric vehicle charging stations, with the goal of making stations more available to people who live in cities.
It’s an idea that was born in Brooklyn, New York, when the company’s co-founder, Jeff Prosserman, needed to charge his own electric vehicle. He realized that the challenge confounding many New Yorkers could bedevil city residents anywhere. 
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“We really look at this as a solution for densely populated cities and environments, people who live in apartment buildings who don’t have access to private garages, who need that convenient charging access point,” he said. 
The stations offer what are considered slow chargers, Level 2 chargers that can fill an electric battery in about four to 10 hours, as opposed to the fast chargers available at gas stations along highways. But the lampposts are curbside and the infrastructure is already there, typically saving time and tens of thousands of dollars for each project, he said. The company can deploy a charger within hours once it has permits.
Voltpost was started in 2021 and today is a venture-capital backed company with more than 20 full-time employees between New York and San Francisco. It has expanded across California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan and New York and is partnering with cities, corporations and utilities.
In September, it introduced what it is calling Voltpost Air, designed for faster installation and compatibility with more vehicles. The modular design mounts about 10 feet above the ground with a retractable cable system to protect against vandalism and weather. The first was activated in Brooklyn in September.
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When you take the politics out of it, most people want clean air and less noise generated by gas cars and energy independence and great technology.
Like other clean-energy companies, it has been faced with the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle green projects throughout the country. In the New York metropolitan area, for example, Voltpost had secured a $2.6 million federal grant for 75 chargers, but the program that allocated those grants has been frozen.
The funds were to come from Biden’s 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which included a total of $7.5 billion for charging stations, $5 billion for ones on interstate highway corridors and $2.5 billion for others in cities and rural areas. Clean energy advocates had hoped the money, which was approved by Congress, was safe from political vicissitudes, but then President Donald Trump paused funding, setting up a battle with Democratic lawmakers, and even some Republicans whose districts would benefit.
A coalition of states sued and in a preliminary ruling in August, a federal judge sided with the states as far as the funding for the highway chargers. The Trump administration acknowledged that the program had been created by a bipartisan act of Congress and started unfreezing the grants.
But the money for the chargers that Voltpost deploys, also approved by Congress, remains suspended.
To boost the adoption of electric vehicles, the Biden administration set a goal of 500,000 public chargers by 2030, most of them financed by private sector investment, said Gabe Klein, the former executive director of the U.S. Joint Office of Energy and Transportation and now a board advisor at Voltpost. In all, the country is projected to need 1.28 million chargers by 2030, more than one million of them the slower chargers.
“There’s what’s actually needed and then there’s what’s needed from a perception standpoint so that people feel comfortable because they’re used to the paradigm of the gas station,” Klein said.
Sales of electric cars broke a record in 2024, with more than 1.2 million sold, according to data from Edmunds, which tracks automotive information. The percentage of new sales for electric vehicles increased from 6.9% in 2023 to 7.7% in 2024.
Industry analysts are watching what happens now that the Trump administration is terminating policies meant to raise the number of electric vehicles on the road. One such policy, a federal tax credit of up to $7,500 for electric vehicles bought or leased, was repealed by Congress and ended on Sept. 30.
Federal money aside, Voltpost received $3.7 million in financing from RWE Energy Transition Investments, private equity investments that support the global energy transition, and from the Impact America Fund, which invests in tech-driven businesses focused on marginalized communities. 
In Michigan, it has gotten $165,000 in state money, first for a pilot program in Detroit and then for chargers on lampposts and in parking lots across Michigan. It recently deployed chargers at the Center for American Mobility, near Detroit.
It is working with the car-sharing company Zipcar, the Metropolitan Transit Authority in the New York metropolitan area, the utilities Exelon Corp. and AT&T, and is teaming up with the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator to expand access in underserved communities. 
“Whatever happens with current politics, the transition to sustainable transportation is beyond a tipping point and truly does benefit all Americans,” Prosserman said. “When you take the politics out of it, most people want clean air and less noise generated by gas cars and energy independence and great technology.” 
The lack of federal support is slowing the transition to clean energy, Klein said. It creates uncertainty for companies like Voltpost, which expected to receive federal money, and leaves the United States even less competitive with China on electric vehicles. At the same time, it forces companies to build a business model that’s reliant on private funding and cities. 
“We’re not going back to DVDs, we’re not going back to landlines and we’re not going back to [internal combustion engine] vehicles,” Klein said.

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