PowerBeam Demos Wireless Electricity At CES

JadedApprentice writes "Caught a mention of this startup yesterday on CNBC while they were reviewing the latest gadgets at CES. In the off chance that there was anything remotely feasible or safe about the wireless power prototypes PowerBeam had on display, I took a quick google and found this nice little write-up on the technology (along with some priceless comments for those that scroll down, and I'm not talking about those on the page below). Bottom line: while it's possibly safe, it may not be efficient and it sure as hell won't power your 1200W gaming rig, the guys at PowerBeam are hoping the convenience of wireless power delivered through directed IR lasers will not only give you the coolest living room in town, but make them very rich in the process" This may be the only one using lasers, but there's a fair gaggle of wireless power schemes on the floor at CES. Besides several chargers limited to charging the controllers of specific game consoles, I walked through a working high-concept demo put on by PowerMat (also mentioned in that PC Magazine article), which relies on dedicated per-device sleeves and dongles to power cameras, phones, and other necessary pocket-fillers; the sleeve-equipped devices then sit to charge on one of the PowerMat induction mats. That means that if your gizmo isn't one for which a sleeve or dongle is available, you're out of luck, unless it uses AA or AAA batteries (there's a charger made to fit on the mat) or can be powered by USB (for which the company has hockey-puck sized USB-power sources, which, Yes, sit on the induction mat). Impressive, but at $30 a pop, that would mean a fair outlay to convert many gadgets to use such a system.

Comments

less efficient? Great!

[Jafafa Hots]

I thought we were supposed to be looking for ways to be more energy efficient, not ways to be less energy efficient?

Re:less efficient? Great!

[TubeSteak]

I thought we were supposed to be looking for ways to be more energy efficient, not ways to be less energy efficient?

Consumers are always looking for ways to have everything be more convenient.
Efficiency is usually a secondary concern.

Re:less efficient? Great!

[Toonol]

Consumers want convenient and CHEAP. Efficiency is often cheaper (not always, though).

What's the point?

[zwekiel]

The quest for wireless electricity has been going on since the days of Tesla, and despite innumerable dollars spent on research and development, we have made precious little progress. Wireless electricity has again and again proved to be unfeasible, and ultimately, pointless. I've never understood why people are so eager to find a true wireless electricity system. While it is certainly an interesting novelty to impress people with, it has very little application in the real world. Most devices which are grounded to an outlet are often the kind of objects we don't lug about, like TVs, printers, or cable boxes. None of these devices will benefit from wireless electricity. For the rare device which is portable, but occasionally requires a power connection, like a laptop, the wire tends to be long enough and unobtrusive enough that wireless electricity is just not really an issue. I think it's safe to say with all the non-news we hear about wireless electricity ever year, I'll be using wireless electricity to power my Phantom console which will run Doom 3.

Re:What's the point?

[kmac06]

Imagine a wireless power distribution network similar to cell networks. Almost everywhere you go, all of your devices can be powered. No recharging, almost no need for batteries. Imagine if you could run your car on wireless power. No need for gasoline, and no need for expensive and heavy batteries. Imagine running a plane on wireless power.

Of course none of the above is remotely feasible in the near future (maybe ever), but now maybe you understand why people are so eager to find a true wireless electricity system.

Wireless Plumbing

[Enderandrew]

Wake me when I can just plug-and-play a toilet anywhere.

Re:Wireless Plumbing

[Enderandrew]

My point (and it wasn't just a bad joke) is that wireless power will only have select uses. If I have to run plumbing in my walls, I might as well run power in my walls. Why go with inefficient wireless power, and drop money on it as well?

There is a nifty-gadget aspect of placing devices on a table and having them charge auto-magically, but for the most part wireless power is a waste.

Hmm...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

So, what are the risks that I'll end up powering my retina, rather than my TV, with one of these fancy IR lasers? For very low wattage applications, this wouldn't be a huge deal, assuming the system has a cut-off when the beam is interrupted; but I would hate to have a laser powerful enough to keep a 100watt TV running(through a solar cell no less, efficiency is going to suck) in my eye for even a fraction of a second.

This system just seems impractical at any scale. For the dump-the-gadget-on-the-mat charging scenario, dealing with inductive inefficiencies is going to be easier than dealing with solar cell inefficiency and having to aim the laser at the gadget. For fixed stuff, you are going to have to align the laser and either have a backup battery, or just deal with the device shutting down, if somebody interrupts the beam. Getting wireless power than can follow a moving target around will mean fairly sophisticated tracking and targeting systems, and possibly multiple emitters.

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

So you would be powering your cornea? Wouldn't that be even worse?

Re:Hmm...

[Sgs-Cruz]

Black paper is opaque to visible light but you can still set black paper on fire with a visible-light laser.

So you might just deposit the energy on your cornea instead of your retina.

Re:Hmm...

[duffel]

You're probably safe from diffuse reflections at those wavelengths. A direct hit on the eye, either directly or from a specular reflection, would be devastating though, and would in all likelihood damage your cornea and perhaps boil part of your vitreous humour.

Aside from eye safety, note that that power beam will happily set fire to things.

wireless you say?

[timmarhy]

it's the wireless power system... that comes with a dongle you need to plug into the wall.

how many power cords will this save? ZERO.

Coolest, eh?

[windsurfer619]

wireless power delivered through directed IR lasers will ... give you the coolest living room in town

And the only one on fire, making it the hottest too!

Problems

[ledow]

The problem with power is that it's powerful.
The problem with wireless is that there's nothing to contain the information/power you are sending down it.

Thus, sending power over wireless is one of those things that ain't gonna catch on until someone REALLY comes up with a breakthrough... i.e. using some sort of technique that we didn't imagine or utilitising some counter-intuitive quantum principle or something. All the current methods (magnetic induction, pointing a "beam" of some kind) have extremely fatal flaws. At the moment, a 10p bit of copper not only ensures relatively efficient transmission over a much wider range of uses (analog/digital data and power, even simultaneously) but also makes sure it doesn't leak out anywhere and kill anyone by covering it in a millimetre-thick bit of plastic.

A wireless "beam" system is inherently susceptible to obstacles which, we assume, must recieve the power in absence of its intended target. So the power either has to be very low to be safe, or it has to be in a form that won't affect *anything* in its path. I don't think lasers could be said to "not affect things in their path", so it has to be very low power to be safe (what's the safe wattage for a laser in your eye? We're talking 1mW or something). Now, you can get "fancy" without thinking too much - a wider beam, which spreads the power over a small area which has to be beamed to the device etc. but all you're doing is adding more complexity, bulk, components, etc. and reducing convenience.

Magnetic induction is one of those things where the energy is relatively safe (magnetic fields) and, unfortunately, low-power and non-discriminatory about its dissipation - the stuff leaks in all directions wasting more of its (already quite low) power, in 3 dimensions which means that you're now getting useful output power proportional to the inverse cube of your input. If you scale up to larger-power fields you start intefering with other things - inducing currents in nearby metals, playing hell with magnetic devices, wiping credit cards etc. About the only practical use is short-range, low-power devices with their own power store (batteries). You won't be able to use this for anything serious yet and you're coming up with a marvellously complicated replacement for a 10p bit of cable and a mains transformer.

This is one of those problems that we'll bodge solutions to for the next fifty years and then, at some point, discover some fantastic bit of physics that lets us transport large amounts of energy from one place to another without affecting anything en route. The entire principle will be so brilliant that we'll instantly start ditching wired power overnight (probably before we know that it's completely safe). Until then, this "invention" will be consigned to the gimmick / pound shop / toy market and not actually do anything really useful.

Stop faffing about by using stuff that's sitting on a shelf in your inventor's shed to move energy from one place to another. We can do it already, in a myriad of quite obvious (and inefficient, useless) ways but the implicit problem is that the energy we "move" affects things in its path, or is affected by things in its path, to such a degree that it's not viable to use or invest in... until that problem is solved wireless power will not move on.

We did the same with computer data - first it was consigned to copper. Then lots of people came up with lots of fancy ways to try to use it without copper (infrared, microwave, radio, etc.). People were building RS232-Infrared gadgets in their workrooms. It wasn't until there was a fairly reliable, non-line-of-sight, large-enough-range, power-efficient-enough, wide-enough-bandwidth way to do so that people actually starting taking wireless ethernet/bluetooth/etc. seriously.

The rule of thumb I'd use is: Can you do it on a large scale and be useful to the big players? If not, it's pointless trying. This was true of solar - there were specialised uses that could pump investment money into i

Re:Problems

[jnnnnn]

in 3 dimensions which means that you're now getting useful output power proportional to the inverse cube of your input

Actually, it's only inverse square. If there is no appreciable absorbtion in the medium, the power spreads out over the surface of an expanding sphere.

I agree with your other comments.

Already cracked

[Skapare]

And it's security has already been cracked. People are ready to get free energy.

Skeptical

[SkOink]

Let's think about this for a second. Assume that you want to power a device which draws 200mA at 5V (a number that's the right order of magnitude for small consumer electronics like an iPod). That works out to one watt of power draw.

For the purposes of this calculation, we'll make some extremely generous assumptions:
1) The device has a 100% efficient switching converter and can utilize all of the power it receives.
2) The device's solar cells are 50% efficient, something which has not been attained even in a laboratory.
3) There are no laser transmission losses in the air.

Even under these completely impossible conditions, that would still require a 2-watt laser. For the record, that is four times stronger than a class-3B laser, and those commonly require protective eye-wear to use in the workplace. A 2-watt laser could burn your walls, your skin, or really pretty much anything it wanted.

The only way I would even _consider_ using lasers for powering anything in my home would be if they were:

1) organized in a grid so that the total output power was spread over a couple of square inches instead of a point charge.
2) The emitter had a straight beam pattern with minimal diffusion.
3) The emitter had an auto shut-off that engaged any time one of a ring of surrounding IR beams were broken. These beams would have to be far enough away from the emitter that the emitter would be able to shut off in-between the time something could break the beams and the time that thing could enter the emitter's path.
4) The two devices sat next to each other instead of being across the room. I would not be willing to target high-energy lasers all the way across my living room, but I might be willing to put down a phone with a solar panel on it immediately next to an emitter.

Re:IR lasers seem like a good way to power remotes

[ILuvRamen]

I'm pretty sure I've seen a video of an IR laser lighting a piece of paper on fire. What's the point of wireless connections like that if you can't walk through them without bursting into flames? You might as well just use a cable. As for what they say about wirelessly charging batteries, well I'd rather see batteries that can flash charge in like 15 seconds. That'd be sweet even if it's wired, which of course it would be. It'd probably take longer to charge the capacitor than the battery too but hey, it'd be awesome! It's not that hard to get 1AH or less of energy from a wall outlet either using some relatively cheap equipment.