Wireless energy

[Rubber314Chicken]

http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_giler_demos_wireless_electricity.html

Apparently effeciency is up to 99%. The only thing I don't get is sending both AC and DC. My teacher thinks all wires will be gone. I think we'll still have an AC infrastructure, but no longer need to plug in most stuff. But permanent fixtures will still be hard-wired.

Discuss.

 

[_-..zKiLLA..-_]

Badass. Period

I hope it goes somewhere

 

[Rubber314Chicken]

Yea. Just think how doable electric cars would be if you could drive down any road and they'd basically be running off the grid, no batteries.

Only time you'd need gas is if you were a super bad-ass and had a hot rod, or went off the road.

 

[berry120]

Brilliant technology - I've been following it on and off for the last few years now and it's great to see it going somewhere and being developed. What's great about this is that unlike lots of technological advances these days, this is truly a solution to a problem, not a solution LOOKING for a problem. The opportunities really are endless. As the guy said you could park your car in your garage and it could charge automatically without any connections - but that's just the start. If all goes to plan then in the future we could be seeing solar / wind farms along the side of roads that charge electric cars as they're travelling along, and that really would be cool. Those solar road panels that were on here a while back? They could be used brilliantly with this scheme, transmitting any power they generate to a nearby substation or just passing cars, and could literally just slot into place without lots of hefty installation work. It'd also make renewable energy much much easier to implement, solar or wind farms could be placed wherever is best without worrying about infrastructure issues.

In the distant future, this could finally make solar satellites a real possibility - so far they've been in the realms of science fiction, but if they could be used with this technology efficiently enough... who knows.

Yes, there will be all sorts of practical constraints, legal and security issues etc. (neighbours could start stealing your power if it's not encrypted! ) but it's hard to imagine something this revolutionary isn't going to go anywhere. It might be a while before this rolls out large scale across the world yet, but when it eventually does I can well imagine this being the biggest technological development since Edison invented the light bulb.

Watch this space.

 

[Rubber314Chicken]

Meh... if wireless power becomes big we will not have a bill for it, but rather a tax.

 

[sniperviper21]

i thought all our radio frequencies were basically already taken up?
how could we fit any more into the spectrum?

but this would be nice.

 

[berry120]

i thought all our radio frequencies were basically already taken up?
how could we fit any more into the spectrum?

a) they're not all taken up - and for something as radical as this they'd be freed up anyway.
b) ...but radio frequencies are completely irrelevant since this technology doesn't use them, it works on magnetic fields instead...
c) ...and since at the moment it's only working over very short distances, it's unlikely that it'd be a problem anyway

 

[David Lindon]

Yea. Just think how doable electric cars would be if you could drive down any road and they'd basically be running off the grid, no batteries.

Only time you'd need gas is if you were a super bad-ass and had a hot rod, or went off the road.

Yeah that would be the ultimate use for wireless energy!

 

[rohan23]

We already sell these mats at Best Buy. They work pretty well.

 

[vampist]

I have been working on this subject for some time now.
Following some ideas all over the internet.
It basically all comes down to Nikola Tesla, who is a personal hero of mine.
It's sort of like taking a magnet.
Putting a nail on it.
Then the magnetic field will carry through the nail to another object.

The actual conversion of magnetic field to electricity is what I am trying to study now.

EDIT:
Forgot to mention that I actually have made simplistic theories and designs, for this product.
The difference is my design has moving parts with in.

EDIT2:
Ah I see how his design works. It's nothing but a low powered EMF. Of course the difference in frequencies it pretty cool.