Pushing 800W of Wireless Power at 5 Meters

Joe Decker writes "The Nevada Lightning Laboratory has experimented with Nicola Tesla's methods of wireless power transmission to push 800 Watts over 5 meters, besting MITs mark of 60W over 2 meters last year. (May I dream of wireless laptop power? I hate power cords.)"

Comments

hmmmm

[moabsoftware]

because we have that much extra money and energy in the dying world for such a waste

Re:hmmmm

[JesseL]

The point wasn't that investment in infrastructure is a waste.

Wireless power transmission is wasteful. Between the inverse square law and eddy currents induced in everything remotely conductive between point A and point B, wireless power would lose a huge percentage of the useful energy generated.

Re:hmmmm

[V!NCENT]

Wireless power is only suitable for everything that is portable. Portable electronics require chargeable batteries. Chargeable batteries are also a wasteful.

Chargeable batteries also generate heat, are harmful to the environment when disposed and can cause fires and serious injury to the point of death when they explode.

There is no point not to use wireless power.

Re:hmmmm

[MooUK]

Wasteful, but extremely useful for certain purposes. Most electric toothbrushes are a perfect example, if solved slightly differently - you don't want unsealed electrical points on a device that gets wet in normal use. Any other sealed device that needs charging could possibly benefit from this.

Re:hmmmm

[gnick]

I don't think that anyone is saying that wireless power isn't wasteful - It's inherently lossy. The issue at hand is whether the power loss using wireless sufficiently offsets the waste associated with other transmission methods (batteries in landfills) or compensates through added convenience for the user.

I mentioned an infrastructure upgrade because we could greatly increase our available piped power while generating considerably less waste than our currently available portable power alternatives.

Re:hmmmm

[kabocox]

Wasteful, but extremely useful for certain purposes. Most electric toothbrushes are a perfect example, if solved slightly differently - you don't want unsealed electrical points on a device that gets wet in normal use. Any other sealed device that needs charging could possibly benefit from this.

So you have a wireless power transmitter in the bathroom integrated in the normal electrical outlet. What powered bathroom devices could we power this way? Tooth brushes, razors, vanity mirrors, shower radios, all sorts of kids toys, and that adult bath toy the battery powered vibrator.

Cell phones, cordless phones, and remotes might also be good to charge via this method as well.

Heck, making AA, AAA, C, and D sized "batteries" that just receives "wireless power" from the "wireless transmitter" would let you power some of those kids toys for as long as you have the wireless transmitter plugged in. That would be much better than running down the batteries really quickly and then either having to recharge or get new ones.

Re:hmmmm

[ushering05401]

Wireless power is only suitable for everything that is portable. ...

There is no point not to use wireless power.

Setting aside concerns about increasing environmental EMF, what would wireless power offer other than convenience?

Wireless power transmission is more wasteful than conventional methods of power delivery.

Your points about batteries and their ill effects are right on, which is why fuel cell technology is getting a lot of focus in the R&D world.

On another note, why would we create infrastructure that could interfere with neural interfaces? Even if we are only talking about the helmet style esp game controllers that are coming to market, why would we saturate our environment with electricity when the next gen of interfaces rely on reading minute electrical impulses?

Re:hmmmm

[Miseph]

Or it could just be used for short range transmission, with wired transmission taking care of shorter ranges. It would be incredibly wasteful to wirelessly transmit electricity from a plant to everyone's home, but setting up small 5m radius bubbles within those homes might not be that much more wasteful than the hundreds of feet of wiring and cords that most American homes require anyway. And just imagine if we could do this with DC, eliminating the need for irritating (and very wasteful) adapters that just about everything requires now.

On a tangentially related note: cleaner coal, nuclear and wind are great and all, but can't we just start sticking solar panels on everything already? They've been around forever, they work great on top of space that isn't used anyway (like roofs), they cause virtually no pollution or other environmental issues once installed and the most common deployments are practically invisible. We could start by requiring new commercial construction to have solar paneling and giving tax credits (at or around %100 of the cost) for that as well as retrofitting current structures, using whatever excess power can be generated to reduce the power we need to generate with less clean methods. It's relatively cheap, easy, and uncontroversial.

Re:hmmmm

[beav007]

Solutions are known to cause cancer in the state of California

Lets think about this for a while

[YrWrstNtmr]

800 Watts over 5 meters, ...
(May I dream of wireless laptop power? I hate power cords.)

I think I'll pass on that. Don't really want that sort of power aimed directly at the boys.

Re:Lets think about this for a while

[CrimsonAvenger]

It's bad enough my electric hybrid Honda bathes me with EM waves ever time I accelerate

Even more horrifying, every time you step outdoors, the Sun bathes you in EM waves!

Re:Lets think about this for a while

[profplump]

If a milliwatt cellphone has the (potential) ability to cause DNA recombination errors

It doesn't. If it did, you would have been killed by the local broadcast media stations years ago. Or, your know, the sun -- that giant ball throwing gigawatts of wide-spectrum EM radiation at us all day, every day.

That's nothing

[internerdj]

I've seen more watts over more distance all my life.
http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/primer/lightning/ltg_damage.html
You just don't want to stand between the source and the destination...

Not great for everyone

[elashish14]

So what happens if you have cavity fillings or a metal plate in your body?

Power and Useless Science

[kenp2002]

A: Never will happen on a large scale. Too easy to "Steal" power when transmitted openly. I dare you to try and tap a power line without permission and see what happens (Provided you don't end up bacon). Hell you can go to jail for using an open wireless access point without permission, imagine you LED lights at Christmas accidentally tapping some transmitted power. Remember the whole static electricity debate? Remember one of the biggest arguments was how to bill for it?

B: Over-the-air transmission of damn near anything tends to fall into the FCC's court. Yeah like we really want them running a power grid. Their too busy trying to start a revenue stream via fines.

C: Until they can 'protect' that energy from being used by unauthorized sources it will never get any investment capital to get it up and running on a large scale. All that it would take is some miscreant to walk into the transmission field, drop a grounder of some sort and kill the power. Just wait till a kid with two forks and ADHD somehow creates a 10k degree plasma arc and burns himself. Hell I've seen office building getting sued for static discharge injuries now. The building next to me sprays the carpet every night as a result of 'an injury'.

D: The next duck that flys in the wrong direction will no longer be blamed on TVs, Radio, Microwaves, Cell Phones, Pornograph, HARP, or day time programming but rather power transmissions screwing up mother nature's compass. Environmentalists will find some wayward owl to block this. Perhaps a misguided 3 toed sloth navigating across an ocean due to power transmission. Hell how often do we hear about crap happening to people who live under power lines. This strikes me as a dead end.

I wish all these egg-heads would focus on practical, immediate, and needed science. Yes! we can confirm there is a black hole in the center of the galaxy! Yes! we found the Higgs Boson. Great! can you feed the homeless guy tonight with that info? No? Grow food in a desert? Ahh. Ohh CO2 on a planet a long ways away, do anything with all the grant money that can help us here on Earth? Though so. I'd rather spend a billion dollars getting to Mars. At the very least if there's no life there we could mine the hell out of it and store our nuke waste in a very deep hole there... Perhaps put a nice UMAX prison there for lifers. No chance of escape when you think about it...

I'm all for theoretical research and research for the sake of learning, but right now we have some serious fucking issues to tackle here on Earth now in the 21st century. 70+ year old power transmission ideaology that is easily killed in the court of commerce seems like a waste right now. I'd rather see brilliant minds doing brilliant things to help people here and now that can't be stymed by 4 simple examples above.

Billions to find a sub-atomic particle and only millions to feed people. Can we swap that M and B please? Even geeks need to eat.

Re:Power and Useless Science

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're missing the big picture.

World hunger is actually caused by politics. America's Midwest produces (or is capable of producing) enough food to feed the entire world. The problem is getting it to the people who need it. That problem is caused by corrupt leaders and goverments. Even when we do get it to the nation in need, the government uses it to feed their armies or sells it off. The hungry stay hungry.

As a replacement technology for our current transmission and distribution system, yes, wireless isn't a good idea.

But what about a power station on the Moon that could beam it's product wirelessly back to Earth? Or what about a smaller satellite? Sure the whole, death ray from space scenario might scare you, but a power station in geosync orbit that wirelessly transmits a couple GWatts of power to a receiver station in the Caribbean or a North American desert wouldn't be so bad.

As for the particle physics, well, yeah. Perhaps understanding those particles will lead to something useful.

Re:Maybe...

[mdm-adph]

I would say what "be a man" means, but as there are a lot of types of women out there, you need to figure out the right approach of "be a man" you need to get the right girls for you :-)

Or you can just a be a jerk. Works up until women turn 30.

Then you just need to be rich too.

terrible efficiency...

[gillbates]

Look at the transfer efficiency: they're using a 3.6 kW transmitter to power a mere 775 watt load.

At distances beyond ten meters, even steam engines have better efficiency. When you consider the best efficiency they had was 38%, and most power plants are about 33% efficient, they need a considerable improvement for this to be practical. By way of comparison, the typical cable delivery system is about 90% efficient and doesn't have the somewhat undesirable property of setting nearby electronics on fire.

Another Mystery Novel without the last half.

[TheNarrator]

I have been following "new" energy for years. Every "new" energy story is a mystery novel with the last half removed.

1. Big announcement.
2. Impressive Demo.
4. Denunciation by "mainstream science" (Second Law of Thermodynamics, etc explained again)
5. ????
6. Never hear anything else about it ever again good or bad.

Re:Wireless power + laptop == bad

[snspdaarf]

I don't want my zipper turning into a toaster either.

Charging electric cars

[cryfreedomlove]

Imagine the applications of this if we had a sizable fleet of electric cars in use.

Place chargers near congested intersections in big cities. Cars would be getting charged while waiting at red lights.

Parking garages for large office buildings would charge all of the cars parked in them for the day.

Others?