The dream of wireless power transmission is far from new; everyone's favorite electrical genius Nikola Tesla once proved he could power light bulbs from more than two miles away with a foot Tesla coil in the s — never mind that in doing so he burned out the dynamo at the local powerplant and plunged the entire town of Colorado Springs into blackout. Tesla's dream was to place enormous towers all over the world that could transmit power wirelessly to any point on the globe, powering homes, businesses, industries and even giant electric ships on the ocean.
Investor J. Morgan famously killed the idea with a single question: "where can I put the meter? It has taken years, but New Zealand company Emrod appears to have finally convinced a major power distributor to have a crack at going wireless in a commercial capacity.
Powerco, the second-biggest distributor in New Zealand, is investing in Emrod, whose technology appears to be able to shift large amounts of electricity much more efficiently, between any two points that can be joined with line-of-sight relays.
Emrod currently has a working prototype of its device, but will build another for Powerco, with plans to deliver by October, then spend several months in lab testing before moving to a field trial. The prototype device will be capable of delivering "only a few kilowatts" of power, but can easily be scaled up. The system uses a transmitting antenna, a series of relays and a receiving rectenna a rectifying antenna capable of converting microwave energy into electricity.
Each of these components appear in these images to simply look like big ol' squares on poles. Its beams use the non-ionizing Industrial, Scientific and Medical band of the radio spectrum, including frequencies commonly used in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Unlike Tesla's globally-accessible free power dream, the power here is beamed directly between specific points, with no radiation around the beam, and a "low power laser safety curtain" immediately shuts down power transmission before any object, like a bird, drone, power thief or helicopter, can touch the main beam.
There will be no difficulties this time working out where to place the meter. Emrod says it works in any atmospheric conditions, including rain, fog and dust, and the distance of transmission is limited only by line of sight between each relay, giving it the potential to transmit power thousands of kilometers, at a fraction of the infrastructure costs, maintenance costs and environmental impact a wired solution imposes.
Indeed, Emrod sees wireless transmission as a key enabling technology for renewable power, which is often generated far from where it's needed. This kind of system could be terrific for getting the products of offshore and remote renewable energy generation into the city grids without the need for giant storage batteries and the like. It'll also be handy in certain unplanned outage events; a truck can be fitted out with a rectenna, and then driven anywhere in visual range of a relay to create a temporary wireless power connection.
The company has been liaising with the Radio Spectrum Management authorities in New Zealand throughout its development process, with a view to meeting every safety standard even once the technology scales right up to high power levels, a process Kushnir says has also helped Emrod develop guidelines for the companies that will be using the technology.
The companies plan to deploy the prototype wireless energy infrastructure across a foot expanse. To make it possible, Emrod uses rectifying antennas, a. It sounds futuristic and fantastic but has been an iterative process since Tesla.
The link to Nikola Tesla , Kushnir admits, is more of an imaginative, feel-good tale than a true genealogy. Emrod, by contrast, can keep the beam of electricity tight and focused with two technologies. The first is transmission-related: Small radio elements and single wave patterns create a collimated beam, which means that the rays are aligned in parallel, and will not spread much as they propagate.
Second, Emrod uses engineered metamaterials with tiny patterns that effectively interact with those radio waves. The researchers solved this problem by using a feedback resistor and voltage amplifier system to detect where it should be tuned to without help from humans. This research is part of an overall push toward safer, clean energy highways with more manageable traffic that will eventually support self-driving cars.
A coil in the bottom of the vehicle could receive electricity from a series of coils connected to an electric current embedded in the road. With coils embedded in the roads, we could eventually enjoy a totally automated highway system.
Self-driving electric vesicles could be wirelessly charged en route, and GPS and other navigation systems would also be powered wirelessly. Although his plan never got past the first tower, which was demolished exactly years ago, his vision of the future was really very accurate.
But one of his greatest ambitions has never been fulfilled: transmitting electricity around the world without wires. His first experiments revolved around sending electricity through airwaves. But these experiments could only send power a short distance. Then Tesla got an idea: would the connection be stronger if he went through the ground instead of the air? Here was his basic theory: send electricity deep into the ground and use the Earth like a giant conductor. Electricity could move for hundreds of miles uninterrupted, and anyone with a receiver could access it, Tesla theorized.
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