Wireless Electricity Transfer

[Winfield1990]

For the Nikola Tesla fans on here , who thinks that the future is going to be wireless electricity?

One corporation that I found within 5 minutes of googling is WiTricity they seem to be having pretty good progress with the technology and over distances of a couple meters to a few centimeters , FOR MEMORY NOT EXACT SOURCE INFORMATION , with an efficiency of 40-95% and higher depending on the distance.

The efficiency doesnt seem far off , to where I think soon they will be able to have only a handful of towers to supply energy at good efficiency.

I would love to see electric cars with no batteries , whether the energy is coming from a tower miles away or every few meters coils set up somehow along the roads to power cars.

Almost limitless power , huge power to weight ratio , and amazing efficiency without ever having to refuel , recharge , or replace any energy into the vehicle. I know this is far off but electric cars with 500-2000lbs less of bodyweight and instant power sounds great.

[dcb]

how can you call %40 efficiency amazing?!?

[redpoint5]

Wireless power will never happen in cars. Blasting energy out in all directions is extremely inefficient. There are already plenty of people that complain about alleged health risks associated with high power electric lines; no way will those hippies allow the air to be filled with energy.

I can see no way of getting around carrying a store of energy, whether that is a battery or other combustible fuel.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Winfield1990

...they seem to be having pretty good progress with the technology and over distances of a couple meters to a few centimeters...

Yeah, it's called a transformer :-)

[saand]

winfield, i like the enthusiasm but not sure the efficiencies are high enough and distances practical enough for the technology to take off.
Nikola tesla had these ideas i guess 60 or more years ago, there is probably a reason they haven't yet taken off.

For light weight electric cars some more workable ideas have been floated such as near feel transformers at traffic lights and a much more likely one of swapping out batteries at service stations so you get a full charged battery so you only have to carry around battery weight for say 100miles worth of a driving.

[redpoint5]

Weight is not the enemy of the long traveler. Wind resistance is. For the short traveler, weight is an enemy, but then it doesn't matter because you aren't going very far. Carrying an energy store is practical, and I see no technology replacing it within my lifetime.

[Straight-3]

I heard there was no way to bill all the users, that's why they didn't use it.

[euromodder]

It also means more high-powered EM (Electro-Magnetic) waves going around.
We've already got plenty of that, and the long term effect on people is still not fully understood.

[gone-ot]

...E-fields or M-fields, which are, respectively, electrostatic or electromagnetic energy transfer methods.

[dcb]

speaking of half-bakery

one thing that did come to mind was a 2d array of coils in the road, and a big permanent magnet on the underside of the nose of the "car" and some big arse coil controller that can sense the cars position, and the car tells the controller where it want to go with a low power wireless signal. The controller then turns on the right sequence of coils to take you there...

The controller can probably accommodate accounting too