Finland is testing a way to  transmit electricity wirelessly,  

using a combination of sound waves, laser  systems and electromagnetic radiation. This  

news recently made headlines and I got a lot  of questions about it. So let’s have a look.

The research in question comes from the university  of Helsinki. The authors report that they have  

found a way to wirelessly steer electric currents,  basically by designing lightning strikes.

How does it work? Suppose you have a high  voltage buildup that wants to discharge  

through air. Usually that happens more or less  randomly along a path of least resistance.

In particular if you get in the way, you are the  

path of least resistance which is  not exactly healthy. In any case,  

the researchers use ultrasound to heat a  channel in the air. Along this channel,  

electric charges displace much more readily so  the voltage preferably discharges along this path.

What does this have to do with this video  that you might have seen along with the news.  

Nothing whatsoever, for all I can tell this is AI  generated junk. The intended use for this sort of  

technology is not beaming power to streetlights or  between streetlights the distance they covered is  

just a few centimeters. Rather they say it might  be useful for surface treatments of materials  

maybe removing defects or that sort of thing. One  could also use this to wirelessly transmit energy,  

that much is correct, but this method is far from  energy efficient. They don’t have numbers in the  

paper but I would guess that more than 90% of  the energy gets lost as heat along the way.

The paper also isn’t exactly new it’s actually  about a year old. What does this have to do with  

lasers? Nothing directly. The team from the  University of Helsinki did not use lasers.  

However, the same thing has been done with lasers.  In this case one uses the laser to heat a path in  

the air rather than ultrasound. That, too, isn’t  entirely new but it is an active research area.

That said, there has been recent remarkable  progress in wireless power transmission but  

no one paid any attention to it! This comes  from DARPA, an agency of the US Department  

of Defense. In a test last year, they used a laser  to transmit more than 800 watts of power delivered  

over a distance of more than 8 kilometres. The  previous record was 230 Watts over less than  

2 kilometres, so that is a huge step forward. The program manager said about this, quote “It  

is beyond a doubt that we absolutely obliterated  all previously reported optical power beaming  

demonstrations for power and distance,” end quote.  And they made this charming summary plot. These  

rectangles here are the previous records. And the  new one… that’s the yellow background… They say  

the efficiency was in the range of 20% or so which  is actually pretty good for this sort of thing.

Now you might say, uh, ok, but this isn’t exactly  the kind of wireless power you were hoping for.  

What you really want is probably a sort of way  that your phone will just recharge out of the air,  

not a giant laser weapon that might  accidentally scorch a few pigeons.

The sad truth is that physics is tough on the  idea of wireless power. Because whatever you do,  

the power needs to go from one place  to another and not anywhere else. 

When it comes to information submitted  through wireless signals, you basically  

send them everywhere and then the receiver picks  out what they need. If the signal gets too weak,  

you amplify it again. But if the end goal  is actually power transmission you can’t  

just splatter the power all over the  place, not only would you lose almost  

all the energy, you would also heat  up everything that gets in the way.

Unless you want to basically live inside a  microwave oven, there are really only two  

ways to fix this problem. The one is that you  keep the receiver very close to the sender.  

This is how contact chargers work. The other is  that you need to clear a path and then try to  

confine most of the transmitted power along this  path. This is what the Fins were doing with their  

ultrasound and DARPA uses lasers for, and that  works, but you don’t want to get in the way. This  

laser charging might one day become useful to, I  dunno, recharge drones maybe, or repower stations  

in remote locations FROM a drone, or something  like that. But you don’t want it in your bedroom.

Really what one would need to transfer power  is a way to keep the electricity confined to  

a narrow path like, like with a cable.  Because really the alternative is that  

rather than looking for cables you’ll  be looking for a fire extinguisher…

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