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Intel snags energy out of thin air, tinfoil hat crowd cowers in the basement
Put on your tinfoil hats, everybody, because Intel has discovered there's enough energy in radio waves to fry an egg. Well, maybe those radio frequency (RF) waves aren't that powerful, but as you can see in the picture above, it's possible to harvest enough energy from a Seattle TV station's broadcast signal (originating 4.1 km away) to run that wireless weather station with an LCD screen.
Besides experimenting with wireless electric power, Intel is also working on ways to soak up energy from body heat, ambient light, waste heat from machinery, and a lot more. Makes sense, because when electric power costs 10 times what it does today, grabbing any source of power will be worth the trouble.
Techonline, via Gizmag
By BoxerFanatic at 5:38 PM ON 01/29/09
Pardon my logic, here....
But if power cost goes up ten-fold, won't there be a lot less ambient RF being transmitted? It takes a lot of power to run a big transmitter, and most of it is not transferred to receivers. Sounds pretty loss-intensive to me. Wires lose a lot less current over distance.
I would think RF transmitters would be shut down and scaled back a lot if power costs ten times what it currently does.
By zintradi at 6:00 PM ON 01/29/09
Nikola Tesla would be proud
By Pax at 9:27 AM ON 01/30/09
This isn't really new tech Intel is playing with. They've only essentially reproduced work done (and taken a few steps forward) by Dr. John Boys of the University of Auckland in New Zealand (and of course, the late great Tesla).
The real work now is being able to capture more energy as the wireless transmission point increases.
Some good info highlighting various breakthroughs over the years at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_transfer
By vongregor at 2:19 PM ON 01/30/09
So everybody go out and get one of these things so we can all steal electricity from our local radio station.
By dashi at 6:15 PM ON 01/31/09
I hope everybody realizes that this energy from all the wireless tech GOES RIGHT THRU OUR OWN BODIES AND MESSES UP OUR VERY OWN ELECTRICAL NETWORK--OUR NEUROLOGICAL SYSTEM and all other cells in our body
By Krusher at 6:26 AM ON 02/01/09
I hope Dashi realises what a fool he looks like considering he's sitting in front of a computer thats radiating more emi than he'd get from the tv antenna 10-20km's ways..
There was also articles about similar power-sapping experiments previously, where people nearby radio towers could run wire coils and draw current from induction caused by the radio twoers output.. one fellow in Australia was fined due to this a couple of years back.
http://www.stopgeek.com/richard-boxs-light-field.html - heres another good example of the science at work, although whoever wrote the article mistakenly wrote that he was using "wasted" electricity.
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2008/07/curlywinged_uav_will_leech_from_power_lines_fly_forever-2.html - yet another example of how leeching power via induction can be done :-)
By Paul at 9:42 PM ON 02/01/09
stealing back ambient wasted energy is nothing new and I hope Tesla is happy people are finally waking up to the ideas he tried introducing over 100 years ago.
I think the research into the conversion of heat into electricity will be the biggest boon. There's more "lost" ambient heat energy to use up than EMI radiation of any sort.
They had some interesting stuff going on about forty or fifty years ago using rotating capacitive plates inside of a heated, ionized gas cloud.
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