Wireless power transmission demonstrated in Toronto
I was at the International Symposium on Solar Energy from Space this week in Toronto where scientists gathered to discuss the feasibility and challenges of establishing massive solar farms in space that beam energy back to Earth. For a quick overview of Day 1, you can read my story on the three-day conference in the Toronto Star. Anyway, one interesting thing I’ll point out is the live demonstration of power being transmitted across a 10-metre open space. Now, it wasn’t a lot of power, but it was enough to light up a cluster of red LED lights and to move a motorized object on wheels. The demonstration team was from Kobe University in Japan, and they were led by vice-dean of graduate engineering Nobuyuki Kaya. It was a neat demo, and all I can say — not being an engineer who lives and breathes this stuff — is that scientists in the room were impressed. Now, all they have to do is scale it up to 1 gigawatt of power travelling 36,000 kilometres via a 1o-kilometre wide beam that doesn’t fry birds or knock down planes. 
Challenges aside, it was pretty cool to watch.
Tags: Space Canada, space-based solar power, wireless power transmission
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
September 11th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
[...] You want to put solar panels where? A common classification made within renewable energy technologies is how far from they are from commercial viability relative to competitors. For example, existing wind turbines are favorably compared to carbon capture and sequestration, considered years from operability. But this is a rounding error compared to the idea of solar energy from space, the topic of a symposium hosted this week in Toronto. According to spaceCanada.org, the concept is “to harvest solar energy on orbit, convert it into a form of power that can be broadcast safely to Earth, and to do so economically,” which sounds simple enough. While it is unlikely solar power from space will be powering your computer any time soon, our energy future is a big problem so there is nothing wrong with thinking big. Even if space shuttles never end up cruising past solar farms in orbit, the efforts on this front could lead to technologies that may prove valuable in other realm including wireless power transmission, which was demonstrated at this year’s symposium. [...]
September 18th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Wasn’t this the plot to the Bond movie: Die Another Day. Except the space based solar station was used to destroy things rather than sustain them.
September 18th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Are there any theories as to what the potential damage would be if say birds or wildlife crossed into the beam or if a plane flew through it?