Posted on 04/06/2021 11:33:29 AM PDT by Red Badger
Picture the street outside your home. Now erase the power lines. Imagine interstate highways without the unsightly cable towers that dot the expansive United States landscape. This could be the wireless future of energy if a partnership between New Zealand’s government and a startup called Emrod works out—and it all dates back to the wildest dreams of Nikola Tesla.
Wireless electricity sounds like science fiction, but the technology is already realized and primed for a utility-scale case study. And in this first-of-its-kind pilot program, Powerco—New Zealand’s second-largest electricity distributor—will test Emrod technology beginning in 2021.
“IT SOUNDS FUTURISTIC AND FANTASTIC BUT HAS BEEN AN ITERATIVE PROCESS SINCE TESLA.”
The companies plan to deploy the prototype wireless energy infrastructure across a 130-foot expanse. To make it possible, Emrod uses rectifying antennas, a.k.a. “rectennas,” that pass microwaves of electricity from one waypoint to the next: a solution well-suited to New Zealand’s mountainous terrain. Specialized square elements are mounted on intervening poles to act as pass-through points that keep the electricity humming along, and a broader surface area “catches” the entire wave, so to speak.
“We’ve developed a technology for long-range wireless power transmission,” says Emrod founder Greg Kushnir. “The technology itself has been around for quite a while. 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. Tesla considered wireless power in the 1890s, as he labored over his breakthrough “Tesla coil” transformer circuit that generated alternating current electricity, but he couldn’t prove that he could control a beam of electricity across long distances. “The sheer fact that he could imagine it is remarkable, but the sort of technology he was looking to apply wouldn’t have worked,” Kushnir says.
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.
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Emrod’s wireless antennas are a medium, like a cable, meaning that their task is to simply connect an electrical supply to customers. Kushnir envisions placing Emrod technology on difficult terrain that links with the sunniest, windiest, or most hydro-friendly points on Earth as these often rural places have the widest gap in electrification.
By eliminating the need for long stretches of traditional copper wiring, Emrod says it can bring power to these regions, which can’t afford the kind of infrastructure that supports the power grid. There could be positive environmental ramifications to this, as well, since many sites that don’t have access to electricity end up leaning on diesel generators for energy.
There are even opportunities to support offshore wind and solar farms, Kushnir says, because the current friction point for those forms of renewable energy come down to the cost of transmission. In the Cook Strait—which connects the North and South Islands of New Zealand—offshore wind farms require expensive underwater cables, for instance.
At this point, Kushnir has enough corporate buy-in to take the next regulatory steps, and begin propagating Emrod’s technology. The real challenge, he says, will be to reassure and educate the public.
“We anticipate a lot of pushback similar to the stuff we’ve been seeing with 5G,” he says. “People push back on additional radiation around them, and it’s completely understandable.” But luckily, he says, Emrod’s controlled beam sheds no radiation. It’s not a “spray” pattern like a cell phone antenna.
So if all goes well during the New Zealand pilot program in early 2021, wireless energy could quite literally be on the horizon in the U.S., too. As for when? That’s anybody’s guess.
IMAGE COURTESY OF EMROD
To wirelessly conduct energy, Emrod generates electricity in a tight and focused beam in the non-ionizing Industrial, Scientific, and Medical band of the electromagnetic spectrum—the portion of the radio band that corresponds to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth frequencies.
From there, a transmitting antenna sends the power through various relay points to a “rectenna” that can safely transport the waves in the same frequency range as the microwave oven in your home. Meanwhile, tiny lasers monitor the rectennas to sense any obstructions between relay points. That way, there is no outside radiation, and no birds are harmed in this transfer of power.
—Courtney Linder
Ping!...........
Fried pigeon anyone?
Squab......................
Instead of resting on power lines, birds will be roasted by them.
I wonder how lssy this method of power transmissn is
So, at 160 feet between transmission points the present “unsightly infrastructure” of power poles will remain, just without the wires/cables. That’s what it sounds like.
We have has all kinds of studies of the present types of microwaves, when it comes to the environment, but no major environmental studies of mass transmission of electricity by microwave.
It sounds like an idea that needs a lot more R&D before it is judged practical or not.
What about when it rains?
Do you think I can get a research grant studying cancer rates among migratory birds?
Nahh... they probably don’t wanna know.
I’m not sure the helicopter pilot’s association or the FAA is going to back this idea unless there is some visible warning.
Fascinating stuff.
Being on fire is a warning...............
And methinks the power loss per distance unit will be much greater than cables. And, of course, there be increased losses during fog/rain/snow. Sorry, I’m betting this will be a loser.
We already have wireless electricity. The hard part is receiving it without going up in a puff of smoke. It has the additional problem that it is often accompanied by hail and tornadoes.
What about birds and other aerial objects that pass through this “tight beam”? Isn’t that something like getting stuffed in a microwave oven?
And you though windmill generation stations were bad for the birds....
Before satellite TV was widely used, there used to be TV microwave signal transmission towers set up as relays across wide parts of the US, but that system was quickly abandoned with the advent of digital TV transmission, which can be done over optic cables buried in the ground.
AT&T once had a whole network spanning much of the US.
https://www.wired.com/2015/03/spencer-harding-the-long-lines/
Rectenna? It damn near killed him!!
It doesn’t quite work.
That sounds harmless unless this tightly focused beam is of some mega-intensity that goes way beyond my regular Wi-Fi.
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