Wireless ElectricityFollow

Although the transmitter and receiver are magnetically coupled, they cannot produce magnetic without electric fields. They just don't produce much electric field, in some sense, and also they are non-radiative, so this is the opposite of what, say, a cell phone uses since a cell phone is for maximum range, whereas this is for good transmission of power (over quite short ranges).

Here's MIT's press release:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/wireless-0607.html

I'm a bit confused by:

"The pads, which would rely on electrical sockets as their initial sources of power, also would be more energy efficient than plugging all of the devices into power sockets directly, he said. The pads would shut off automatically when a device has finished charging and are about 70 percent to 90 percent as efficient as transferring power through a wire, he said."

Ouch. Well, whatever. These power pads, with the high efficiency claims, are over very short ranges, and not new. The new stuff is the point of the article.

"The team explored a system of two electromagnetic resonators coupled mostly through their magnetic fields; they were able to identify the strongly coupled regime in this system, even when the distance between them was several times larger than the sizes of the resonant objects. This way, efficient power transfer was enabled."

Several times the size of my cell phone is not very far. But for a room, it is possible. But worse then that, how lazy are we that we can't even plug something in?

I'm always hoping that some DC standard will come along and we'll have a single AC to DC converter in our homes or offices, which will be a smart device and shut off when not in use, that all our electronics will plug in to. Or a new standard will be set for AC to DC converters which prevents the waste which is so common now.

I will gladly grant you 3 and 4. I think that (2) could be worse, not better. I obviously don't know the system in detail, but if they are talking about putting a system on a whole room, or rooms, these are going to be giant coils of wire. As for (1), maybe. Same as (2), really, I don't know the system. It could be at least as much of a fire hazard as what we have now.