The question is, why is it important?
Well in the later part of Afghanistan war, significant time, money, and lives were spend shipping diesel around. If you can avoid that, you can save a shit tonne on logistics.
From the YouTube comments: Video carefully avoids to state that the overall efficiency of the system is 1.8%. Input power was 91.2kW at the TX antenna, out of which 1.65kW was produced at the receiving side. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/mediastore_new/IEEE/content/medi...
1.0km and 60% efficient is not very impressive.
various parts of the DoD are very interested in things like hydrogen fuel cell generators, more advanced/efficient diesel generators, prepackaged photovoltaic power systems, etc. they fund and buy prototypes all the time. they're well aware of the problem in transporting liquid fuel around.
Recharging drones is a good example, depending on how compact the receiver can be developed you could even integrate into the drone and keeping it up continuously .
There are bots like the stuff Boston dynamics builds that can work in say a minefield or other hostile environments for more time or continuously if you could be beam power to them.
You could use it to recharge cctv and other perimeter monitoring system sensors rapidly in a new output where you haven’t time to do wiring , or the outpost is temporary .
In a urban environment you could to keep you active EM emitting equipment like radar / satellite dishes equipment 1 km away and be safer from missile strikes.
Sure it would be nice to have 100s kW at 10s of km but a kW is plenty of power for a lot of devices and there are solid applications
There’s also a big benefit of refueling electric drones with this.
it's a whole construction project to erect one, anybody that lives in the area or has access to half-decent aerial photography is going to know fully where/what it is.
putting up a big-ass tower with a flat microwave receiver array aimed somewhere towards the horizon is going to be even more obvious than ground mount solar.
They could pre-ship out the dishes to EMA agencies around the country. Quickly deploy in a few hours and re-power areas that have been destroyed by hurricanes/tornadoes/wildfires until the electrical grid is re-established or a ISO container can be sent.
At some point in the future it might become feasible to beam the energy down from a Low Earth Orbiting Satellite, which would transfer logistical costs into the preemptive side of accountancy instead of reactionary accountancy, but if they could do this from a LEO, then perhaps its also become a bit of a non ballistics weapon which may not be covered/restrained by current international agreements.
I would imagine alot of Radio transmitting knowledge would be useful in this domain of knowledge.
The real story was the tower was built for information not power delivery. But Marconi got there first and made it irrelevant. Tesla decided to repurpose the thinking around some fanciful bullshit for power delivery to pay off all the money he’d borrowed to build it. This cycled into non delivery, because quite frankly it didn’t work, and he ended up bankrupt, living in a hotel for free after giving the hotel owner a “death ray” for security. This turned out to be some primitive measurement device.
Tesla did a lot of good work on AC power delivery however. But that was it. I’d rather remember him for this than the legendary bullshit.
The transmitter would be a phased array antenna, and getting even that much focus would require a reference signal transmitted from the ground station.
There's plenty of contractors out there who specialize in building such things from existing COTS systems/subsystems and components. Look at the specifications and size of some of the large ground mount PV systems in China and India. Margins are very thin in this business and very competitive on $ per kWh feed-in tariff rates paid to contracted systems. The construction process has been optimized to nearly as good as it can get now. Labor is a major cost.
Or can be connected to something long distance similar in tech to the pacific HVDC inter-tie to move power long distances to where it's needed, or can be used to pump water uphill in a nearby pumped-storage hydroelectric system.
Let's briefly look at some of the issues:
1. We need to carefully look at where that efficiency happens and then examine every place where loss of energy can occur, especially those that aren't stated. Let's take a brief look at some of the more obvious ones:
2. Conversion of energy into power suitable for generating microwaves at the transmitter. On earth, and assuming direct connection from the power grid, we need to consider losses in the power transformers and power supply or switching power supply, these days efficiency can be very high perhaps even 90% or more. As this equipment will be used primarily for military use, it would likely couple with diesel motor/generators suitable for use in the field, if so then I'd be surprised if the combo was more than 35% efficient at best (someone who knows up-to-date specs on these units correct me if necessary). If the unit is ultimately used in space then the conversion efficiency of its solar panels must be taken into account. As far as I'm aware no solar cell has ever reached 60% or over—even the best GaAs ones (from memory, this 60% figure would exceed theoretical 'quantum efficiency' figures).
3. Assuming no other loss at the power supply end (such as offline batteries, which are a distinct possibility in the field in military use) then we have to take the efficiency of microwave sources into account. I've not up-to-date figures on the latest 10GHz generators so I'd be guessing these figures, suffice to say that until recently generating microwaves was comparatively inefficient (unless magnetrons are used and they have messy and inconvenient HV power requirements).
4. Next comes the waveguides, antenna horn and focusing unit and the antenna (these, if optimized, could be quite efficient).
5. Now comes the path loss between transmitter and receiver. Exactly what that is remains to be seen. I've worked with microwaves and I can assure you that it is dead easy for the antennas be slightly off alignment and you receive almost no signal. For this scheme to work efficiently there would have to be some kind of efficient control system (servo/feedback, etc.) that keeps the TX and RX antennas in precise alignment. Moreover, at 10GHz a storm or a heavy rainfall downpour could kill the circuit altogether (I've actually seen this happen to the extent that only over a path of a half dozens or so miles that not only the fade margin, normally >30dB, on microwave links was exceeded but also the signals fell so low that the circuit was actually lost. Moreover, for reliability, two microwave links were run in parallel and both circuits failed for some 5 or 6 minutes until the rain cleared).
5a. Now the killer bit: as mentioned, commercial microwave links have huge fade margins to protect against variations in atmospherics and objects—planes etc., blocking the way. These links have what is known as AGC—Automatic Gain Control—to keep signals level. That cannot apply in power transmission; in practice, even a temporary path loss of 6 - 12dB (which could easily be expected) would essentially be catastrophic, that is effectively kill all received power at the receiver (they'd want to have pretty good battery backup and often in military operations that's not always possible, extra weight etc.)!
6. Now comes the horror bit (this could also apply to the generation of the microwaves at the transmission end). That is, the rectification of microwaves at the receiving end will generate considerable RF hash and noise. To be efficient, the diodes rectifying the incoming RF would have to have an f(t) of well in excess of that frequency and heaven help anyone operating a microwave receiver within many miles of the receiver (radio astronomers for instance). As the rectification diodes have to be near or on the antenna for efficiency, screening them to stop them radiating locally generated crap everywhere would be a near impossibility—remember your Fourier lessons, you're chopping sine waves up to get DC and that means harmonics—the more efficient the process the more noise generated! Any attempt to filter the hash and noise generated by the diodes would further reduce efficiency. This is the sort of scenario that spectrum managers and planners have nightmares about.
Whilst this isn't quite the same, here's an example that illustrates what can happen. I had an Amateur Radio friend who used to do moonbounce on 432MHz and he'd often complain to me that various LED lights (i.e.: diodes) in his neighbors' possession would interfere with his incoming reception to the point where on occasions he'd have to abort the exercise. Now keep this in mind, he raised this matter with me over 10 years ago when LED lighting was far less common that it is today.
Face the facts, much of this pronouncement is little more than spin. Likely the principle reason the video was made was to keep their funding masters happy. Little of it will fool the technical cognoscenti.
Also keep in mind that all 'niceties' are off during military conflicts, interference to services other than to the military's own communications equipment would likely be irrelevant (as we saw in WWII, the military was the principal user of spectrum, what it wanted it got).
As for a permanent space port 'broadcasting' power to earth the idea is ludicrous—that is, until thousands of questions about likely problems have been asked and that genuine engineering solutions for them are actually found.
Seems to me their PR department has taken a leaf from the wordbook used by social media and politicians—that's the one that redefines the word 'fact'!