Wireless power transfer pursued
Building off work unveiled last year by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, Intel Corp. demonstrated how to make a 60-watt light bulb glow from an energy source 3 feet away. The Intel team did it with relatively high efficiency, losing only a quarter of the energy the researchers started with.
"That to me is the most striking part about it – transmitting 60 watts at 75 percent efficiency over several feet," Intel's chief technology officer, Justin Rattner, said in an interview. "The power pack for your laptop isn't that efficient... it's one of those things that's almost too good to be true."
Wireless transmission of electricity makes use of some basic physics – electric coils that resonate at the same frequency can transmit energy to each other at a distance.
But this technology has a long way to evolve before it becomes a commercial product. In both the MIT and the Intel work, researchers used charging coils far too large for wide-scale use.
Eventually, a homeowner could attach a large transmitter to a wall – or even bury it inside the wall – and plant smaller receivers inside nearby tables and chairs and other pieces of furniture, creating the ultimate in recharging convenience.
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BERLIN - Asia will for the first time use half of the world’s electricity by 2025, even as Africa continues to consume far less than its share of the global population, according to a new forecast released Wednesday by the International Energy Agency.
Much of Asia’s electricity use will be in China, a nation of 1.4 billion people whose share of global consumption will rise from a quarter in 2015 to a third by the middle of this decade, the Paris-based body said.
“China will be consuming more electricity than the European Union, United States and India combined,” said Keisuke Sadamori, the…