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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.)"
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.
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...
So what happens if you have cavity fillings or a metal plate in your body?
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
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.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
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.
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.
Here be signatures
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.
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.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
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.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
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.
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.
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?
I don't want my zipper turning into a toaster either.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
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?
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.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Solutions are known to cause cancer in the state of California