Wireless electricity, is that you Tesla?

A New Zealand startup, partly funded by the government, has developed a prototype system for the wireless distribution of electricity utilising electromagnetic waves rather than copper conductors.
Emrod is their name, and they’ve told Nikola to hold their beer whilst they develop a technology to achieve similar goals he was aspiring towards.
They claim it’s safe and effective over long distances, I couldn’t find a definitive length over which it works.
The bloke who started the company, one Greg Kushnir, claims ‘vast’ distances which sounds promising.
Powerco, New Zealand’s second largest power supplier is investing money in a proof of concept which will lead to a field trial.
The technology they’ve used for the prototype only transmits a few kilowatts but Kushnir claims the technology is scaleable to 100’s of times this power.
Sounds like they still have a little ways to go but could be a game changer if it pans out.

Dream On . Transmitting power at low amounts Like cell phones is barley safe .
But try standing in front of a microwave receiver they use for sheriffs and see how long you last .

No power source could be transmitted in amounts high enough to power much more then cell phones .
The simple reason being power passing through any molecules creates heat Lots and lots of heat as any one who puts food in a microwave can attest to .
Fact is the power that is LOW . It does not take much power to create enough heat to fry you .

Transmitting power is easy we could have done that 75 years agaio how to keep that power from frying you well that cant be done . Does not matter electric radio what every power enough to even Ru on home transmitted would be enough to FRY anything that went through the beam .

Not convinced ? go out at night when its quiet look at a transformer on a random poll when its misty out and watch the steam rise off it and hear the bussing of the power going through it .

go run your washing machine then feel the motor that runs it and convince your self you could transmitte 125 volts at 250 amps safely . That is barly enough to run just ONE home .
Transmit power sure keep it from frying people birds well any thing that comes near it cant be done well unless you wanted to try grounding every single living thing on the planet lol .

Dream on? Yeah why not that’s how New technology is discovered and developed. They say they’ve been in cahoots with the Radio Spectrum Management to ensure safety standards are met. But like I said sounds like there’s a ways to go...
How many patents have you racked up in your highly decorated engineering career? Asking for a friend 😁


reply to: midnightstar

a reply to: kingparrot

They claim it’s safe and effective over long distances, I couldn’t find a definitive length over which it works.

Since it uses microwaves, transmission is line of sight and is directional.
It has nothing to do with what Tesla was trying to do.

newatlas.com...

The function doesn’t, that’s correct, but he was aspiring to wireless electricity distribution.
a reply to: Phage

a reply to: kingparrot

Yes, broadcast through the Earth.
He didn't really understand electromagnetic radiation.

It would be interesting what his enormous brain would come up with in this day and age.

a reply to: Phage

a reply to: kingparrot
There are lots of red flags in this interview with Greg Kushnir, some claims don't sound feasible, and some claims are contradictory.

First, start with wired power transmission as a baseline. Power line losses are typically in the range of 7%, Kushnir claims total losses in US wired power distribution systems is 10-15%. It could be that high in certain cases but let's use his 10% figure for the sake of discussion as a basis for comparison.

His first claim about efficiency is reasonable, he says the transmitter is 70% efficient, so that's 30% loss right off the bat, triple what happens in wired systems. Then he makes some implausible claims about efficiency in the rest of the system being about 100%. Very few things in real life have 100% efficiency so his claim is rather extraordinary and would require extraordinary data to back it up and even then I'd be inclined to conduct an independent test.

The relays are essentially lossless. The loss there is almost zero. They don't require any power, you can think of them almost like lenses; they refocus the beam.

Even if relay efficiency was 99%, that's not really lossless. He's not telling us the real efficiency, the word "essentially" is an acknowledgement he knows it is not really lossless. And this gets worse:

So the relays are lossless, what's the efficiency of the whole system like?

The efficiency of all the components we've developed are pretty good, close to 100 percent. Most of the loss is on the transmitting side. We're using solid state for the transmitting side, and that's essentially the same electronic elements you can find in any radar system, or even your microwave at home. Those are at the moment limited to around 70-percent efficiency.

So there he admits the 30% transmission losses and tries to imply losses in the rest of the system are minimal. Well exactly how minimal? I'd say if he gets 30% loss in the transmitter and another 20% losses in the rest of the system that's feasible in certain circumstances, but that's 50% loss total, compared to say 10% loss with wired systems.

He also is not very forthcoming about the safety issues, though he does admit if you walked into a beam it would heat you up (that's what microwaves do, right? They can heat things with water in them, like turkeys, or people).

we have a laser matrix, so we make sure that the beam always touches nothing but clean air. And even if we didn't use that laser matrix, you'd have to linger quite a while in that beam to get a little bit of heating effect, say one degree hotter.

This is ambiguous:

The levels of density we're using are relatively low. At the moment it's about the equivalent of standing outside at noon in the sun, about 1 kW per square meter.

Obviously we'll increase that, but the levels of power density will still be quite low.

So he's got a 2 KW test system, which by the way I get billed for about 1.9 kW when my 1.3 kW microwave oven is running, so just that one appliance alone uses almost 2 kW according to my electric meter.

He says the ultimate power densities will be higher, but how much higher?

Kushnir claims the technology is scaleable to 100’s of times this power.

He doesn't say, but if his test unit can barely power my microwave oven, he's got to transmit a lot more power than his test unit does to be very useful, and if he scales it up to 100s of times the power, how does he do that? By either increasing the power density, or making the beam wider, or both.

There's also the question of how wide is the laser beam used to cut off the power if the laser gets blocked, versus how wide is the microwave beam? If the laser beam is relatively narrow (think laser pointer) and the microwave beam is relatively wide (think in area of how many square meters), is it possible to get at least partially in the path of the microwave beam without blocking the laser beam? If he chooses to keep power densities very low when he scales up the power hundreds of times, this means the microwave beams would have to get very wide. Nothing he says convinces me that's not possible to get in the path of such a wide microwave beam. I don't know the details of his laser system and how wide the laser beam is compared to the microwave beam, he didn't explain that, but that should be a concern which I don't know if he's adequately addressed it or not.

I'm not one of the people worried about 5G because it's low power. His systems are high power once he gets past his 2 kW prototype unit, and I do get concerned about safety of high power EM fields.

I agree with everything you’ve written. The technology is early though, and he claims is scaleable.
It’ll be interesting to see how a field trial go’s and how scaleable the system actually is, how efficient it is when dealing with greater power communication.
I’m an electrician by trade, I’ve worked in power distribution at sea and on land so I’ve got some idea what he’s up against.
He’s having a crack though, so good on him, and good on the New Zealand government for sponsoring him to a degree.
I think it’s worthwhile keeping an eye on his progress, I like it when smart driven people prove their naysayers wrong.
I’m sure the company is aware of the all known limitations the average Joe will be able to put up on forums like this.
reply to: Arbitrageur

a reply to: Phage

If all he's doing is broadcasting microwaves then midnightstar is totally correct, you cannot transmit large amounts of power without microwaving people. The technology Tesla claimed to have developed was not based on traditional electromagnetic technology and he claimed it could work over any distance. Electromagnetic induction is extremely limited in range.

originally posted by: kingparrot
The technology is early though, and he claims is scaleable.

I didn't get any sense of any new or "early" technology from his interview, the same basic tech has been available for a long time, and I seem to recall making a post on ATS almost a decade ago about a company that already offered wireless microwave power transmission.

The losses were far higher than wired systems. Don't just think about the monetary cost, but also about the environmental cost of using a wireless system which is 50% efficient instead of a wired system which is 90% efficient. With the former, you have to burn almost twice as much coal compared to maybe only 11% more with the wired system, and that means almost twice as much greenhouse gases released into the environment.

There were specialized applications where the wireless technology could make sense, such as one example being a temporary construction project in a remote location where you need power temporarily. In that example it could be more economical to pay twice as much for the wireless power than to erect temporary power lines that won't have any use after the construction project is completed. But it was never competitive with wired power distribution in general even if you set aside the safety issues.

What Greg Kushnir described sounds like it's based on the same laws of physics that have been around since the time of Maxwell, the only thing that remotely sounds like "new" is his comment that as computers have become more powerful, and as software has become better, it's now easier than ever to model electromagnetic fields on computers, which he says has allowed him to tweak his designs for better efficiency, though it apparently hasn't helped at all with the 30% losses at the transmitter, which already gives it 3x the losses of wired systems before any other losses are considered.

You’ve missed a couple of points there... having a less efficient distribution system wont have a negative impact on the environment as they plan to use the technology on fully renewable energies, one example given was ocean wave generator systems, you can see how a lower efficiency is offset by the lack of maintenance needed on underwater cables for example. There are obviously no fuels used in this type of energy.
Also he clearly states that new materials used in the system construction has had a great effect in recent advances, as well as the computing power which they used to test their designs without physically building them.
He states microwave technology has been around since the 70’s however it hasn’t been used so ambitiously until now in this type of application. I’ve no reason to take your written word over his. I’m happy to wait and see where it goes.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Yes Dream On king . PIP dream that is .
DONT Stand In front of a 50,000 wt radio transmitter because you wont last LONG .
You guys got to stop watching cartons its not Dexters lab nore is there any white lab mouse who is tring to take over the world .
I worked on a oil firer power plant The WAST heat was stiffing ( lucky I was just there to do pluming )
And all that is with lines which reduce waste heat .
Sure your going to Transmit hypertextbook.com...
NEW York area Usage ."4. New York 4093.2 Trillion Btu" New York City alone 4.31 GW
(electrical only 1991 RATES . Sure your going to transmit that .
Turn off the SCIFI channel .

As i said it is possible to transmitter power Its NOT possible to do it in anyway that WONT kill every thing that goes through the beam .
Lord they say 5 G may cause problems for people health as you need so many transmitters . and you believe you can transmit say 100 GW a 1000 GW ? How about 10,000 we Use alot of power people .

I got the impression that the idea was not to beam electricity directly to devices/consumers/power sinks but rather set up a relay system, where there are transmitters & receivers carrying charge over distance, sort of how the power lines do it now. The article had some pictures on this IIRC. I'm guessing the idea is that the charge will then terminate at a traditional kind of utility pole, where they can put transformers on it to get the voltage how they want it, and use traditional wires to transmit it into conventional settings, buildings, houses, etc

This seems more about changing the grid to relay electricity over distances with much less physical wire, and not a revolution in wirelessly powered consumer equipment or getting wireless electricity into neighborhoods.

I agree with what others have said about concerns with the microwave radiation (although if you get the infrastructure off the ground, the concern is less about people than animals), and the lower carrier efficiency.

There's all sorts of questions in my mind about quirks with such a system. Would it be much simpler to 'tap' the power through the air (hoover a drone with an induction device on an arm, connected to a power line to the ground, between two relays?). Speaking of iduction, how would this system hold up against massive magnetic storms/CME from solar storms? Would the problem of induction just shift from the wires to the relay devices/poles? Seems like with no wire, the surface area of the problem goes way down to just the relay transmitters.

a reply to: SleeperHasAwakened

With no long conductors involved, geomagnetic activity would not be a problem. Transmitters themselves would not be directly affected and could be isolated from the problems involved with the low frequency fluctuations involved in the main lines.

But I can't see this system being used to transmit the amount of power transmitted by high tension lines. It seems of potential use much further down the distribution system.

I never said it was going to replace the grid, now did I? I don’t think anyone did. If you look into it a bit further you might get a handle on the suggested applications...
a reply to: midnightstar

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: SleeperHasAwakened

With no long conductors involved, geomagnetic activity would not be a problem. Transmitters themselves would not be directly affected and could be isolated from the problems involved with the low frequency fluctuations involved in the main lines.

But I can't see this system being used to transmit the amount of power transmitted by high tension lines. It seems of potential use much further down the distribution system.

Yes, it almost seems like this project has a narrow, applied use that is not really suitable to replace the current grid. I'm thinking like a pop-up, "micro" grid where the power needs aren't significant, but there's a demand to quickly distribute power over a small geographic area, potentially where topography makes running cables too difficult. Seems like something of interest to the military, or companies needing to quickly establish a presence in remote areas.

a reply to: SleeperHasAwakened

Mountainous areas and such. Station on this ridge. Station on the next ridge. If it turns out to be as scalable as advertised.

They are non-specific about the frequencies to be employed. If they are going to be using the higher end of the band (ISM) things like rain will be a problem.