Wireless charging for remote areas & drones via radio and mm frequency waves
Long-range wireless charging is a concept dating back to Nikola Tesla’s patented Tesla coil in 1891.
Today, wireless charging offers significant value: reduced infrastructure setup and maintenance time and costs, reduced human effect and footprint throughout nature reserves and sensitive ecosystems, and reduced likelihood of outages caused by wire damage.
The technology would be useful for delivering electricity from offshore wind farms, solar farms, and other remote sustainable energy sources to difficult-to-access locations like islands.
Companies such as Emrod are working on this application. Long-range wireless can include beam power from space to earth, wirelessly charging UAV (which don’t need to return to their charging stations), and also transmitting power to hard-to-reach locations with traditional wires.
NASA's sps-ALPHA project. Source: SingularityHub/NASA.
Source: Emrod
You can read more about the enablers that lead to this on our blog post, Metamaterials - Part III.