[LINK] Some shocking news about wireless electricity

[rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au]

All,

I have decided to ignore the Inforworld article, which is so badly 
scrambled that I ditched V1 of this message. Trying to correct something 
written by a victim of brain-sucking aliens is just a frustrating waste 
of time.

Second, back to the MIT group. What they're using is magnetic induction 
using tuned coils. OK, I'll buy that. A normal transformer doesn't like 
much distance between the coils (we can separate the coils a little, 
which is how contactless chargers work). So the researchers tune the 
coils to improve the distant performance.

Back to the MIT article (here: 
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/18836/ ). "Efficient" in the 
article has a specific meaning: "they showed that the scheme can 
transfer power with an efficiency of 45 percent."

That's not a New Age of Wireless Charging for consumer devices. That's 
wasting more than half the input power.

How does MIT discuss the efficiency issue? It ignores it; in a 
time-honoured technique of spin, MIT's article changes the subject (it 
ignores power waste and instead segues into dismissing "fears" of health 
effects that nobody expressed).

So I'll say it for MIT: something which wastes 55% of the input power is 
not even remotely useful as a consumer product.

RC