PowerBeam steps closer to launch of wireless electricity

December 22, 2008 | Dean Takahashi | Comments |

Transferring electricity through the air to power an electronic gadget seems impossible. Nikola Tesla, the radio pioneer, tried unsuccessfully to do it in the early 1900s. Technical hurdles have plagued the attempts to do the same thing ever since.

But PowerBeam, a small Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company that I first came across in April, 2007, says it is making progress on a technology that can transfer electricity — or more accurately generate electricity — across a room. It does so by focusing a laser on a solar cell, which converts the energy into electricity.

Grier Graham, vice president of product development, said the company can use a laser to generate about 1.5 watts of power to a solar cell as far away as 10 meters. That’s enough to power an electronic speaker or small low-wattage light-emitting diode (LED) lights. It can also charge the battery in a digital picture frame. But it’s not enough to operate a laptop (which requires maybe 30 watts to 50 watts).

But down the road, this product and others like it could create an enormous market for wireless devices that need power but are handicapped if they are tethered to a cord. These are devices that can’t get enough energy from direct sunlight to power them.

The current prototype’s receiver (left) is smaller than a fist and its transmitter (pictured at top) is about the size of half a brick. That’s a lot smaller than the original prototype I saw. The company still says it is about 18 months from having the products in the market. These folks have a long way to go, but they are making progress.

Graham, the brother of co-founder David Graham, says that the company needs to raise money to create a low-cost, fully customized version of the product. PowerBeam needs about $5 million to $6 million to do that.

The company raised $600,000 in a seed round from European venture capitalist I2BF. The company is one of perhaps a handful  that will show some kind of wireless electricity technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Competitors include Witricity and Powercast. But both of those aren’t transmitting electricity as far as PowerBeam is trying to do. Other competitors are focusing on transferring electricity a very short distance from a charging pad to a cell phone. The idea is to use inductive coupling (or other methods) to charge multiple cell phones on one charging pad. The companies in this market include Powermat, eCoupled, WiPower and WildCharge.

PowerBeam was started a couple of years ago by co-founders David Graham and Xiaobing Luo. They point a laser at a solar cell, which takes the light and converts it into electricity. The problem with using a powerful laser to do this is you could slice somebody in half. So the company uses lasers that are powerful enough to do the job, but are safe. For instance, a safety system cuts the laser power if something interrupts the beam.

In future versions, Grier Graham thinks people can use this technology to power laptops without power cords. They could, for instance, sit at a cafe or a hotel ballroom and draw power from a light fixture above the room. The laser can seek out a solar receptor and concentrate its energy on that spot when it finds one.

You could also use it to power a security camera that doesn’t get enough light from a solar cell alone. In the near term, the company is focusing on getting a small amount of electricity across a room to power the digital picture frames, speakers, and lights. The company has four full-time employees and three contractors.

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About the Author, Dean Takahashi

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • Anonymous
    Holy crap. Free space lasers are bad enough when you just use them for communication. Using them for power seems to be an incredibly bad idea. Even a 1 watt beam is easily enough to injure someone if something goes wrong, which it certainly will if used as suggested.

    Then, too, what is the efficiency of the laser? What is the efficiency of the solar cell? Multiply these together and compare to the loss on a cable, or for that matter to just carrying some extra batteries around with you. Even ignoring all the issues associated with trying to carry optical power through the air (dust, the need for a straight line beam, the risk of getting blinded by a random reflection, etc.), this is just silly.
  • Anonymous
    I should also say this is the opposite of a green technology, since it is inherently more wasteful than pretty much any other form of power transmission. If the laser diode has 80% efficiency and the solar cell has 40% efficiency, that means that for every 100 watts from the grid that goes into this thing, only 32 watts is delivered to the terminal device -- you're just throwing the rest away, along with the equivalent amount of fuel or other resources that was needed to produce and deliver the 100 watts from the power plant in the first place.

    I honestly don't know how much loss there is in a 10 meter or even a 100 meter copper power cable, but I'm sure it's vastly less than 78%. There may be some very specialized applications for which remote laser power is suitable, but powering laptops or other devices indoors is not one of them.
  • Anonymous
    Er, 68% not 78% ^^
  • John
    Voltage loss of copper would be very minimal for 10 meters -- the guage of the wire also has an impact.

    See http://www.paigewire.com/volt_loss_formulas.htm
  • Anon
    A laser diode is at best 30% efficient, so it's worse than you think.
    This works out to 12.5W into the system to deliver 1.5W to a load, or 12% efficient.

    Wireless power is the snake oil of the times. Here are the steps:
    1)Turn a 11th grade science project into a demo that can wow some venture caps looking to make up for dot-com and real estate.
    2)Round up $6M to 'go full production'.
    3)Vastly improve the founders lifestyle, new offices, more marketing, more demos, quarterly sales meetings in Maui.
    4)Ventures pick the new CEO.
    5)Contract a CM in China to finish the design, and build 10,000 units.
    5)Wait for the big orders.
    6)Big channels tell you it's too pricey, to this, too that, no demand, etc. Spend more on marketing.
    7)Layoff 80% of office staff, press release reports 'down economy causes re-org'.
    8)Co-founders leave 'to pursue other interests'
    9)Venture caps finally wake up, try to recover any funds to go after the next bubble.
  • Ed
    Spot on Anon!
  • I disagree with your assertion that the technology is inherently more wasteful than any other form of power transmission. One important thing to focus on is the applications it enables. For example, Home Automation is a product group we are looking at that can quickly retrofit an energy inefficient home into an efficient home through the addition of features such as powered blinds and heating/cooling registers.

    Additionally, wireless power as a whole can save energy by assessing power needs to provide only the necessary amount of power for any given device and thus never using “vampire” energy. The U.S. Department of Energy determined that, on average, 75 percent of all electricity used to power electronics is consumed when products are not in use.

    Finally, specifically for PowerBeam, we are riding some very powerful trends that are developing faster than Moore’s Law. So, this technology will be not inefficient for long – similar to other hardware technology like PC’s and cell phones.
  • Daniel
    Yes, I too would want to know this has been thoroughly tested and approved before I would use the products in my home around my family. Lasers just beaming all over the place...what happens if the safety system fails and my son gets blinded or worse? Lawsuits a plenty may come of this...
  • Yes, we will have to past tests from UL, Tuv, CE, etc. Every company that sells a hardware component or a wireless power component in the market must past these test and we are no different. We completely compile with the standard and will get that seal before we start selling product.
  • Randy
    Not to be a grammar or spelling nazi, but there are *two* mistakes in the above posting. I don't know if I want to trust my money or eyes to a person that cannot spell (or even spellcheck) "pass" and "comply". Instead of "past" and "compile".
  • Anon
    fuck your son, what if *I* get blinded?
  • A 1.5 watt laser beam doesn't sound particularly safe...
  • Hi tlrobinson,

    Thanks for your comment. Actually, the system itself is very safe; we wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't. I think some people get caught up with the term "laser beam" because Hollywood has put this image in peoples head that it is some type of Star Trek or Star Wars death ray and it isn't. A better term to describe our technology is Optical Energy which is invisible and eye safe. We simply use laser diodes to turn the power into this optical energy that is "beamed" across a room. No one would ever be harmed in any way and we can actually guarantee this. I hope this clears things up, let me know if it does not. Thanks.
  • Chris,

    Sorry, that doesn't explain much. Perhaps a hand-wavy explanation is good enough for someone *without* a [fairly limited] background in electrical engineering and physics ;)

    I imagine this "optical energy" you speak of is just electromagnetic waves, like the same lasers I'm thinking of...

    Reading the site (http://www.powerbeaminc.com/how.php) it looks it is actually using an infrared laser. Just because it's not visible doesn't mean it's safe, especially at 1-5 watts (and, of course, you can't see infrared so you don't know to look away). It seems the "safety" of your product comes from a mechanism that immediately shuts off of laser if the beam is broken.

    Is the FDA aware of what you're trying to do? I imagine you expect them to approve your product. It still seems like a risky proposition to me, given that consumers aren't currently trusted with laser pointers and such more powerful than 5 mW.
  • Den
    Good point about safty. Although to my knowledge FDA or Food and Drug Administration does not approve light or laser emitting products. Only x-ray emitting.
  • It seems the Center for Devices and Radiological Health which is a division of the FDA is responsible for laser regulations in the US: http://www.lasercompliance.com/us-regs.htm
  • Anonymous
    Indeed, infrared is definitely not safe just because you can't see it. 1.5 watts of IR on the retina is nothing to sneeze at.

    Note that http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Photonic_Dis... which has 100 mw output is advertised as a weapon.

    Lasers at this power level can be used to pop balloons or light matches. The laser apparently being used for power transmission is over 10 times as powerful.
  • Actually, the beams are in the IR and these run at 1470 nm wavelength. Anything north of 1400 nm is eye safe. Are the lasers you are thinking of north or south of 1400nm? If below that wavelength, then yes, they are definitely not safe and we don’t use those.
  • wburchill
    "Anything north of 1400 nm is eye safe".

    This is a dangerously absurd statement.

    It is always a question of wavelengths, powerlevels, and exposure times. For example, here's a quote from
    http://www.eyesafety.4ursafety.com/laser-eye-sa...

    "THE UNPROTECTED HUMAN EYE is extremely sensitive to laser radiation and can be permanently damaged from direct or reflected beams. The site of ocular damage for any given laser depends upon its output wavelength. Laser light in the visible and near infrared spectrum 400 - 1400 nm (the majority of lasers used in dermatology) contributes to the so-called "retinal hazard region" and can cause damage to the retina, while wavelengths outside this region (i.e., ultraviolet and far infrared spectrum) are absorbed by the anterior segment of the eye causing damage to the cornea and/or to the lens. The extent of ocular damage is determined by the laser irradiance, exposure duration, and beam size. As laser retinal burns may be painless and the damaging beam sometimes invisible.."
  • Hi tlrobinson,

    Sorry that my comment was a little bit vague. It was geared to a more general audience. As you are an EE, I can go into a little more detail that you will appreciate.


    The beams run in the IR at 1470 nm wavelength. Anything north of 1400 nm is eye safe. Are the lasers you are thinking of north or south of 1400nm? If below that wavelength, then yes, they are definitely not safe and we don’t use those.

    Unfortunately, I can’t reveal too much about our safety system as our patents are still pending, but I can say that we ensure the absolute safety of the system using 3 different safety techniques. I can say that if there is any interruption of the beam, the system instantaneously shuts down.

    Yes, we will have to past tests from UL, Tuv, CE, etc. Every company that sells a hardware component or a wireless power component in the market must past these test and we are no different. We completely comply with the standard and will get that seal before we start selling product.
  • "The beams run in the IR at 1470 nm wavelength. Anything north of 1400 nm is eye safe."

    Optically less dangerous, perhaps. But there's still a lot of thermal energy that's going to arrive at your retina if you were ever to cop on in the eye. You'd boil the tissue within and at the back of the eye.

    Vitreous humor omelettes, anyone?
  • Me
    Another factor of safety mentioned on their website is the power density which they said would not exceed 10mw per mm^2 (and would more likely be 2mw per mm^2) i.e. while greater then the power density for the sun (1.35mw per mm^2) it is not sufficiently high enough to create sufficient heat to be dangerous quicker then any shutoff could control (minutes till it gets warm not milliseconds) as for the eye this is still in fair tolerance of a safety for its wavelength as can be seen here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_safety
  • Sceptic
    1. By a "pending" patent, do you mean a conditional patent? These are publicly available records (www.uspto.gov). You should be free to discuss that which has been previously disclosed.
    2. Reliance on an adjunct safey system makes the system only as safe as the system is reliable. What if this system fails?
    3. If, as you state, the stated wavelength runs at an eye-safe wave length, why do you need to go to the added expense and trouble of an additional safety system.
  • Sceptic
    Chris,
    I think any "Optical Energy" (i.e. light), whether coherent or not, has the potential to cause eye damage if it's bright enough, regardless of its visibility. Staring at the sun, for example is not advisable. I also think that the damage might not be immediately apparent.
    Questions:
    1. How bright is your "Optical Energy" source compared to other sources of "Optical Energy" - e.g. the sun? To be fair, the comparison should be based on energy density.
    2. Can you point to objective tests using animal models that show that this product does not cause eye damage? If not, why not? After all, if this isn't safe enough for a mouse or a rabbit, how can you claim that it will be safe enough for the public at large (i.e. babies, toddlers, the mentally/judgementally challenged, tow truck drivers, carnies, etc)
    3. Would you be willing to post a demonstration video to youtube where you, or better still your child stares directly into the "Optical Energy" light source for some extended period of time, say a 60 seconds?
  • Once this technology has been sized to fit ill tempered sea bass... the possibilities are endless.
  • Chris
    I'd rather fit this on the front end of a friggin' shark.
  • Powerbeam offers a great product ready for commercialization. I have to say right up front that I am VP of Marketing for Powercast. Wireless Power, as a form of alternative power distribution systems, is part of an exciting and growing aggregation of companies. Many of them are mentioned in the article.

    What is important at this point is to celebrate technology and commercial success and innovation that these companies contribute. More importantly, 1.5 Watts is a huge amount of power if coupled with a known duty cycle and a rechargeable battery. The point being that if an electronic is consuming 10 watts for 5 minutes per hour, and 1.5 Watt/hr can be applied to it, then this is huge.

    Great job, Powerbeam! Wireless power is a final frontier for a world that is largely untethered.
  • Hey Steve! Thanks for the post. Powercast is doing a great job as well. This industry is really starting to heat up. I think wireless power is going to be a big hit at CES. Let's meet up sometime during the show. I will stop bye your booth and we can go get a coffee.
  • DeeperCollaboration
    Are PowerBeam and Powercast in some type of collaboration? As it appears from what is available on each of their web-site, their approach to wireless power uses entirely different approach. One is a low-power RF (below allowed emmision levels and RF harvesting) technology whereas the other one is a FIR based blast of Laser power to achieve reasonable power levels at large distances.
    Can Steve or Chris explain how in the future the two technologies may complement each other? Do you plan some kind of approach where in PowerBeam proveides the long ditance hauling of wireless power and Powercast does the local distribution?
    This exchange of pleasantaries between stiff competitors looks very pleasing and wonderful but is there something more cooking here.
    Ha Ha, just found out that the poor guys at PowerBeam are not even properly funded whereas Powercast is already selling hardware development kits.
  • Matthew
    I am in the same office complex as PowerBeam and I have been fortunate enough to see their prototype first hand as well as try out the safety system. It is 100% safe and worked without a hitch every time. I don't know which is more remarkable, the technology itself or the fact that they are doing all this on just the seed round of money they raised. I can't wait to see what they produce once they close their Series A (I just wish I was rich enough to participate in it). Soon we will all be able to ditch this extra baggage of power cords and experience Truly wireless efficiency. Keep up the great work powerbeam!
  • Anonymous
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

    This really doesn't make me feel any better. This whole thing is sketchy at best.
  • Shanky
    Its silly to focus on the safety of an invention without first considering the uses. Going that way, an automobile could never have been invented, and a knife may well have had issues...
  • Marko
    " Nikola Tesla, the radio pioneer, tried unsuccessfully to do it in the early 1900s. "

    unsuccessfully ??? what does mean unsuccessfully ?

    From Britanica :: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/58859...
    " He also lit 200 lamps without wires from a distance of 25 miles (40 km) and "

    Thing that anyone else on planet don’t have enough brain to repeat same thing after 100 years is for some other topic, but hardly you can say unsuccessfully !
  • Tesla's Spinning Ghost
    "Nikola Tesla, the radio pioneer, tried unsuccessfully to do it in the early 1900s"

    That, sir, is a vicious lie!
  • I have seen about 25 watts transmitted to a bulb
    2 inches away. This is an interesting concept
    to achieve greater range.

    thanks from tony
  • Jeremy
    Cancer in a box. What do we have that is good for us?
  • Thanks for sharing... :)

    From http://www.xetech.info
  • big-frank
    Another useless idea. This article does not bring up any of the negative aspects of the product, including it's potential for damage or the inefficiency as other posters have stated. The appearance of Powerbeam's staff makes this post suspicious for being anything more than a press release rather than an actual article.

    Is there no actual investigative reporting anymore?
  • Desert Tripper
    Nikola Tesla "unsuccessful" ? I wouldn't call lighting a bank of 200 light bulbs and running an electric motor at a distance of 26 miles from the transmitter unsuccessful.

    Impractical, perhaps, but definitely a success.
  • Joe
    This is really dumb.
  • DB
    Sorry, Tesla was not unsuccessful at transmitting wireless power. Everyone after him has been unsuccessful.
  • Neahh
    This is really really stupid. First off you loose some energy when creating the laser beam. Then solar panels have a very large loss when converting laser beam into electrical energy. Now to insult Nikola Tesla by saying he "tried unsuccessfully" is just due to a lack of information. Nikola Tesla was successful at creating wireless electricity and was building a power plant. However, he lost funding when they realized there was no feasible way to charge people for wireless electricity. There is the real reason we do not have wireless electricity because it is impossible to make people pay for something that is freely floating in the air like radio signals.
  • Simon Redington
    Note to Dean Takahashi: Any antenna receives wireless power. We also get quite a bit of wireless energy from the sun, about a KW per square meter. Electromagnetic Radiation.
  • cyber_rigger
    Tesla & associates were unsuccessful in MARKETING wireless power.

    There seems to be no doubt that Tesla achieved wireless power transmission.

    This article needs to be corrected.
  • jintoreedwine
    Indeed, Tesla did invent a form of wireless power, but if you have ever seen it the limitations are quite large. The antenna must be in the same plane as the waves emitting the power and the strength drops off as an inverse square as you move further away from the source.
  • James
    This is the sort of idea that gives scientists and engineers a bad name:
    From the comments above, I see a startup company cobbling together a sales pitch for something that is either dangerous and won't work, or if not dangerous - is so low power as to be completely useless.
    For example:
    The assertion "The beams run in the IR at 1470 nm wavelength. Anything north of 1400 nm is eye safe." First: Do NOT use terms like "north of 1400nm" which immediately puts you in the sales-speak "playing wth the big boys" or "take the ball and run with it" nonsense. The fact that you use a laser wavelength below the eye's sensitivity doesn't help: On the contrary, it's good at boiling wanter, or doing interesting chemistry which leads to injury or death.
    Saying "Real life isn't like James Bond" is flippant: Lasers are dangerous, as you'd know if ever you attended a laser safety course, which is mandatory for scientists using milliwatt lasers.
    And you glibly talk of "only 1.5W".

    Finally: The very idea is fatally flawed from the efficiency viewpoint, as mentioned above.

    The only people who will be interested in this idea are:
    - Industries needing to power devices in inaccessible, low light conditions: For example nuclear power stations, or just possibly - mining. And even then - non-critical applications only.
    - The military: They have more money than sense.

    But stop giving renewables a bad name, and re-write your business plan along the lines of niche industrial applications or military applications.
  • That is a great idea, once achieve they can combine a speaker that transfer sounds in the air which we already have and one that transfer electricity in the air.
  • Jeffri
    Just Recently, We have made an experiment on wireless electricity at school, we failed miserably which shows me that we may be a little far from understanding and ultimately produce wireless electricity.

    -------------------------------------
    Electric Bicycles
  • ramdin
    Jeffri...shoot and e-mail to info@powerbeaminc.com and they can show you how to do this in a better way...

    Obviously this is not a school level technology as many people on this board prefer to refer it to as...

    Even the principles of airplanes is simple...but how many companies can really make a plane??

    It takes some smart and skillfully experienced engineers to design "safe" and "secure" wireless power transmission...
  • edhardy622
    British law student sues Abercrombie-Fitch for disability discrimination.
    http://www.abercrombieshop.us
  • Lestenya
    Thanks for information ;)

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  • Thanks for information ;)