Elon Musk’s Answer To Stephen Colbert’s Vision Of Wireless Charging
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I don't like techcrunch, I expect very little to no journalism from them. But that was one of the worst written, contentless, fluff writing bordering on vapid that I have had poor fortune to read.
Elon Musk’s Answer To Stephen Colbert’s Vision Of Wireless Charging: laughing at Colbert's jokes.
Did anyone who voted this article read it or watch the interview?
To get any efficiency, you need to tightly constrain the EM field, at which point, you are effectively hitting a plug anyway.
Or, you are accepting enormous radiative losses and losing massive amounts of power. Doubling or tripling the power draw in every device just so it's powered wirelessly is a non-starter.
For cars, we're more likely to get automated charging stations that just plug themselves in. That's going to be a useful problem to solve.
No clue how efficient typical USB charging is, the AC-DC conversion is at around 80%, then you've got the battery chemistry which cursory research seems to peg at around 80% efficiency as well. So lets say it's about 1c per charge, at EU power prices.
Still, multiplying the cost of charging an iPhone by 10 isn't bad. And in fact you can buy a lot of solutions that enable this, because you're right, it's not a big deal for a lot of people, and the convenience is worth the cost.
For an electric car, increasing the charging cost by a factor of 10, or even a factor of 2, is a much tougher proposition.
Maybe I just happen to have a good idea, but that seems easy to do.