Modern life runs on wireless technology. What if the energy powering our devices could also be transmitted without wires? This week we are revisiting a talk by electrical engineer Ali Hajimiri, where he explains the principles behind wireless energy transfer and shares his far-out vision for launching flexible solar panels into space in order to collect sunlight, convert it to electrical power and then beam it down to Earth. Learn how this technology could power everything — and light up our world from space.
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[00:00:00] .
[00:00:08] Have you ever heard of The Man Who Failed to Earth?
[00:00:12] It's a great story. The 1963 book by Walter Tevis
[00:00:17] is a sci-fi classic that has inspired numerous movie and TV adaptations.
[00:00:23] The plot follows an alien who arrives on Earth in search of a way to save his species from extinction.
[00:00:30] In the latest version of the story, a Showtime series that came out in 2021,
[00:00:35] the alien is searching for a renewable energy source for his planet.
[00:00:41] Watching The Man Who Failed to Earth made me think, we need to harness our energy alternatives better.
[00:00:46] But how do we do it efficiently and at the same time create sustainable ways for everyone to use renewable energy?
[00:00:56] I'm Sherelle Dorsey and this is TED Tech.
[00:00:59] After listening to educator, engineer and inventor Ali Hajamiri on the TED stage,
[00:01:05] I got the feeling he considers these kinds of questions every day.
[00:01:10] Ali is creating practical research here on Earth that would take advantage of outer space.
[00:01:16] Listen in as he discusses wireless power.
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[00:03:33] Hackers and cyber criminals have always held this kind of special fascination.
[00:03:38] Obviously I can't tell you too much about what I do.
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[00:03:44] And I was like, well, this is child's play.
[00:03:47] I'm Dina Temple-Reston.
[00:03:49] And on the Click Here podcast, you'll meet them and the people trying to stop them.
[00:03:53] We're not afraid of the attack.
[00:03:55] We're afraid of the creativity and the intelligence of the human being behind it.
[00:03:59] Click Here, stories about the people making and breaking our digital world.
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[00:04:08] Click Here every Tuesday and Friday wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:04:14] Energy and data are the major currencies of our lives today.
[00:04:20] Over the last couple of decades, we've seen data going from being wired to becoming wireless.
[00:04:28] And this has helped democratize access to information.
[00:04:33] Can we do the same thing with energy?
[00:04:37] Can we send energy when we want, where we want and as much as we want?
[00:04:41] And in the process, eliminate the last wire.
[00:04:47] If you could do this, the possibilities would be endless.
[00:04:50] From Earth to space.
[00:04:54] I'd like to tell you about our dream of wireless energy transfer today.
[00:04:58] It starts with something we're all familiar with, waves.
[00:05:03] If you have two waves that have the same frequency and are going up and down,
[00:05:08] and they come together at some point in space,
[00:05:11] they will add and make a wave that's twice the height but carries four times the energy.
[00:05:17] Now if the same two waves come together at some other place in space,
[00:05:22] but one is running half a period late,
[00:05:26] they cancel and you get very little energy, practically no energy.
[00:05:32] This is the basis for a process that has been known for a long time.
[00:05:37] It's called interference.
[00:05:39] The idea here is that if you go and sit at the edge of a pond
[00:05:42] and take both hands and put them in the water and move them up and down,
[00:05:45] each hand makes a wave.
[00:05:48] But because of the interaction of these waves, there will be some directions where you get more energy
[00:05:53] and there are some directions that you will get less.
[00:05:55] Can we make it go only in one direction?
[00:05:58] Well, you need more hands.
[00:06:01] And they have to go perfectly synchronized.
[00:06:04] But if you do that, what happens is that most of your energy starts traveling straight down.
[00:06:11] Now this is a remarkable thing because if you think about each one of those little hands,
[00:06:16] each one of those little sources, they will send energy all over the place.
[00:06:20] But when they work together, the result is that the energy is going mostly in one direction.
[00:06:26] Now if the timing was the reason for this happening,
[00:06:32] maybe we can play with it, maybe we can mess with it and see what happens.
[00:06:37] So what if each one of these sources goes a little bit after the one next to it?
[00:06:43] So in that case, what happens is that these waves start going in different directions
[00:06:47] and you can change that direction purely by controlling timing and nothing else.
[00:06:54] Now this makes it possible to change this direction without any mechanical movement,
[00:06:59] so it can be almost instantaneous.
[00:07:02] You can go even farther.
[00:07:04] You can think about creating a magnifying glass, a focusing system
[00:07:10] where you can actually send the energy, most of it, close to 90% of it in one focal point.
[00:07:16] But again, since you're controlling the timing,
[00:07:19] you can create different focal points and you can send it to them.
[00:07:22] And this is the basis for wireless energy transfer.
[00:07:27] It's as if you have an army of ants that are working in perfect synchronization.
[00:07:35] And each one of them contributes a little bit of energy,
[00:07:39] but as a whole they send it to the right place.
[00:07:42] Now, obviously here timing is everything, like life and comedy.
[00:07:52] So we've taken this concept and we've built these electronic chips, integrated circuits,
[00:07:59] that each one of them generates a little bit of power,
[00:08:02] but again as a group they are designed to work in perfect synchronization
[00:08:06] and drive these little antennas that transmit the energy.
[00:08:09] Now, this army of ants or army of antennas is working together
[00:08:14] to create those focal points of energy.
[00:08:17] So what you have here for example is a generator unit
[00:08:21] that's sending power wirelessly to the two receivers.
[00:08:25] And here the point is to see how well defined these focal points are.
[00:08:30] That LED panel basically is receiving that power and showing it.
[00:08:33] So you can see energy is going only where it needs to go,
[00:08:36] and nowhere else.
[00:08:37] You can take this and put one of these generators
[00:08:40] on the ceiling of your conference room or your living room
[00:08:43] and transmit energy to various devices that need energy.
[00:08:47] Now, this generator on the ceiling is going to power a light bulb.
[00:08:53] Now, as we move the light bulb what happens is that
[00:08:58] you see that there's no energy in the new location,
[00:09:00] but the system finds it, tracks it and sends it to the right place.
[00:09:04] The system finds it, tracks it and sends it to the new location.
[00:09:09] You can use this to send energy to one light bulb
[00:09:13] or to the next one or to both of them at the same time.
[00:09:19] Now, you can use something like this for example
[00:09:22] to power a drone and it can also use the same tracking approach
[00:09:26] to track the drone.
[00:09:29] So now that we know that we can send energy wirelessly,
[00:09:33] the question is how far can we go?
[00:09:36] Really, how far can we go?
[00:09:40] Could we put photovoltaics in space, solar panels in space
[00:09:45] and collect that energy and send that wirelessly to Earth?
[00:09:51] This is not a new idea.
[00:09:54] It was in a short story, science fiction story
[00:09:58] by Isaac Asimov from 1941.
[00:10:02] The first question almost always is asked is that
[00:10:06] why do you want to put your solar panels in space?
[00:10:09] Why don't you put them up in the desert and be done with it?
[00:10:14] Few reasons.
[00:10:18] First is that in space you get about eight times more energy
[00:10:22] because you don't have day and night,
[00:10:24] you don't have clouds,
[00:10:26] you don't have seasons
[00:10:28] and you don't have the atmospheric absorption.
[00:10:31] Also, now that you have this ability to send that energy
[00:10:36] where you want and when you want dynamically,
[00:10:39] you can imagine that you have dispatchable power.
[00:10:43] On top of that it's an always available power.
[00:10:47] This can be used for a place, for example,
[00:10:50] let's say an island hit by a hurricane
[00:10:53] where there is no power
[00:10:55] or a city in war zone
[00:10:57] where the power infrastructure is being constantly attacked.
[00:11:01] You can think about using this to send power
[00:11:04] to a remote village in sub-Saharan Africa
[00:11:06] where there is no infrastructure for power transmission
[00:11:10] and that way democratize the access to energy
[00:11:14] or send it somewhere above the Arctic Circle.
[00:11:17] So all of these things are great,
[00:11:19] but the question is if it has been known
[00:11:21] for such a long time and it's such a great thing,
[00:11:23] why hasn't it been done so far?
[00:11:25] The main reason is that the way it has been envisioned before,
[00:11:28] they've been thinking about it as a big elephant.
[00:11:31] They've been thinking about putting big solar panels in space,
[00:11:34] collecting the power, generating a lot of energy
[00:11:37] and then putting into a massive parabolic dish antenna
[00:11:41] and sending it to a fixed location on Earth.
[00:11:44] Sending things to space is expensive.
[00:11:46] You pay dollars, and that's plural, per gram.
[00:11:50] The other problem is that even if you could afford it,
[00:11:53] assembly of something like this in space
[00:11:55] is still beyond the capabilities that we have today.
[00:11:58] So we came up with a very different approach
[00:12:00] where we took our generators
[00:12:03] and turned them into flexible fabric-like structures.
[00:12:07] We are utilizing the amazing power of electronics,
[00:12:10] integrated electronics and the flexible electronics
[00:12:13] to make these very lightweight,
[00:12:14] flexible fabric-like structures
[00:12:16] that you can roll and pack.
[00:12:19] And this allows you to have these satellites packed
[00:12:23] for launch and deployed in space,
[00:12:26] where each one of these units would be about
[00:12:28] several tens of meters on the side,
[00:12:30] and then you can have a pack, a whole bunch of them,
[00:12:32] and create a constellation of them
[00:12:34] that flies in space and forms your power station
[00:12:37] to send green energy to Earth.
[00:12:40] We've been developing, as a proof of concept,
[00:12:43] a technology demonstrator,
[00:12:44] and this is called Maple,
[00:12:46] which demonstrates the power of flexible structures
[00:12:49] and electronic systems.
[00:12:51] We have integrated the power of flexible structures
[00:12:53] and electronic circuitry
[00:12:55] to generate and transmit power in space.
[00:12:58] We integrated that with two other technology demonstrators
[00:13:01] for deployable structures and photovoltaics
[00:13:05] that were developed by three teams led by myself
[00:13:08] and two of my colleagues,
[00:13:09] and we integrated into a satellite
[00:13:11] that was launched recently.
[00:13:15] And the purpose of this experiment
[00:13:17] has been to demonstrate
[00:13:19] wireless power transfer in space.
[00:13:22] Now, that brings me back to the promise
[00:13:26] of wireless energy transfer
[00:13:28] and what it could mean for us.
[00:13:30] I believe this technology is too compelling to go away,
[00:13:35] and I believe it's bound to appear in our lives
[00:13:38] in one form or another,
[00:13:39] and that is something to look forward to.
[00:13:42] Thank you.
[00:13:56] All right, that's our show.
[00:13:58] Thanks for listening.
[00:14:00] TED Tech is part of the TED Audio Collective.
[00:14:03] This episode was produced by Nina Lawrence,
[00:14:05] who also wrote it with me, Sherelle Dorsey.
[00:14:08] Our editor is Alejandra Salazar,
[00:14:10] and the show is Fact Checked by Julia Dickerson.
[00:14:14] Special thanks to Farah de Grunge
[00:14:16] for production support.
[00:14:17] If you're enjoying the show,
[00:14:19] make sure to subscribe and leave us a review
[00:14:21] so other people can find us too.
[00:14:23] I'm Sherelle Dorsey.
[00:14:24] Let's keep digging into the future.
[00:14:26] Join me next week for more.