Problem:
The world is becoming exponentially hungry for electrical energy and every possible solution should be examined.
Solution:
Globally-transmitted wireless power
In 1901, Croatian electric engineer, Nikola Tesla persuaded a millionaire J.P. Morgan to finance $150,000 (today’s $4.2 million) for the building of a 187 ft (57m) tall wood and copper structure called “Wardenclyffe Tower” in Shoreham on Long Island, about 65 mi (100 km) from New York City. Power for the entire system was to be provided by a coal fired 200 kilowatt Westinghouse alternating current industrial generator.
Tesla’s tower was intended to excite the planet Earth’s natural electrical resonances, where high-power waves of electrical energy flow repeatedly around the entire planet many times before eventually dying away. Tesla claimed it could transmit free electricity across the Atlantic and beyond, with no wires.
A number of experiments were made to perform trans-Atlantic wireless power transmission, as well as commercial broadcasting and wireless telephony and even facsimile images, based on his theories of using the Earth to conduct the signals. Experiments were discontinued through lack of finance and the tower was eventually disassembled in 1917.
Tesla’s invention was considered crackpot until more recent discoveries about electro-magnetic waves, in particular with a high Q-factor, all the way around the Earth many times, over and over before eventually dying away, suggested that it could work.
In 2014, Leonid and Sergey Plekhanov, graduates of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, claimed they had spent years scrutinizing the Nikola Tesla’s patents and diaries and that Tesla came very close to wireless power transmission. The enthusiasts say they need about $800,000 to reconstruct the famous.
According to the authors of the project, as of today all human civilization’s electric energy needs could be covered with a single installation of solar panel measured approximately 316 x 316 km (100,000 km²) positioned in a desert somewhere near the Equator. They believed the only stumbling block to such a project is the delivery of electric energy to final consumers, as the loss of energy directly depends on the distance of transmission.
Unable to find the necessary finance, the Tesla/Plekhanov solution has not yet been built. On a smaller scale, their Global Energy Transmission (GET) enables battery-powered drones to fly forever by safely and quickly recharging while still in flight.
In order to charge, drones just need to hover over one GET’s hotspots for a few minutes. This creates the opportunity to build Wireless Power Networks to enable drones to do things that were previously unavailable due to low battery limitations.
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