How Wireless Power Technologies Can Amplify Clean Energy Production and Reduce Our Carbon Footprint

Dr. Ahmad Glover Founder & Cherif Chibane, Chief Technology Officer at WiGL

After a year filled with climate disasters, the recent COP26 conference closed with a renewed commitment to limiting the global temperature rise to a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius, in line with promises defined in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Urgent action to protect our planet and reduce its carbon footprint has never been higher on the agendas of today’s government leaders, and with that comes a need to reassess which new technologies can help to meet these goals.

Although wireless power technologies initially caught the attention of customers and investors because of their convenience (they remove the burden of the endless cables and plugs needed to charge our devices), they’re also much better for the environment than their connectable counterparts.

While the idea of wireless energy is not new—in fact, it dates back to the 1980s—wireless power technology (WPT) has become increasingly sophisticated over the past 10 years.

WPT does quite literally what it says on the tin: it sends energy to power or recharge devices, industrial equipment, or electronic vehicles through thin air, much like connecting to wireless internet.

And not only is WPT making our everyday lives easier, but its multiple environmental benefits are also now being laid bare for the world to see. In this article, we’ll explain how WPT can reduce our collective carbon footprint and help individual consumers, businesses, and governments focus on cleaner energy production.

How WPT Can Sustainably Reduce Carbon Emissions

The real benefits of WPT for reducing carbon emissions lie in touchless wireless power technology (tWPt), which operates without connecting a WPT receiver to a mains electricity point at all.

By eliminating the need for cords, copper electrical wiring, plugs, and adaptors, tWPT naturally reduces the carbon emissions that would normally be used to manufacture this charging equipment and dispose of it.

But this isn’t the only benefit of touchless wireless power technology. It’s also significantly more cost-effective than other forms of renewable energy such as hydro, solar, and wind energy. Wind farms, for example, involve high infrastructure costs such as underwater cables, making them expensive to maintain in the long term.

Besides this, tWPT also reduces our individual reliance on IoT and 5G devices—most of which are battery powered—and are becoming an essential component of our day-to-day lives. For example, tech research company Garner predicts that there will be a total of 25 billion connected IoT devices by the end of this year, each with multiple sensors which all individually require batteries.

But as they corrode, most batteries are hugely polluting for the environment, as the chemicals inside them leak into the soil and contaminate water supplies. Therefore, the more we can use tWPT instead of relying on batteries to power devices, the more carbon emissions can be reduced.

WPT and Large-Scale Green Energy Production

Using wireless power devices to increase green energy production on a larger scale is a more complex challenge, given that most devices that operate using WPT or tWPT can only transmit electricity over relatively short distances.

However, by embedding tWPT transmitters on streets, light poles, and satellites, the technology can also operate outside of the home. In order to further increase the distances over which tWPT can operate, new transceiver architecture is currently being developed.

Once tWPT becomes available on a wider scale, it will also be able to advance greener forms of transportation by providing wireless charging for electric vehicles such as buses, trucks, and cars.

Currently, the main way to charge these vehicles is by plugging in an electric cable attached to the vehicle into a mains electricity socket. However, once wireless charging becomes widely available, the demand for these vehicles is likely to increase, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from fuel-powered vehicles into the atmosphere in the long term.

The next step to large-scale green energy production is convincing businesses, which are responsible for higher levels of pollution, to commit to using WPT and tWPT in order to reduce their carbon footprints instead of buying carbon credits.

While the idea of buying carbon credits is to invest in projects that reduce carbon emissions elsewhere, the reality is that the benefits of these projects are often outdated and difficult to measure. Therefore, many companies end up simply buying carbon credits to give the impression they are investing in green energy production without actually reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, tWPT can be the alternate, greener solution these companies need to become more environmentally friendly.

How WPT Can Help Power Grids to Become More Sustainable

The ultimate goal for large scale green energy production is to make power grids more sustainable.

Currently, grids are powered by burning fossil fuels, which release harmful greenhouse gases into the air. Power grids traditionally also operate via a copper-based network of unwieldy power lines, cables, circuit breakers, switches, and transformers that are difficult to manage.

However, by using WPT and tWPT instead of fossil fuels to power electrical grids, levels of harmful greenhouse gases in the air will naturally reduce. By transforming this analog power to digital, power grids can modernize and begin to collect data, which can then be studied in order to make them more energy efficient in the long-term.

WPT can also be a useful way of extending wireless power grids across countries, especially in ones where access to electricity is limited in some areas.

Wrapping Up

Though the widespread switch to wireless power is still a while away, the good news is that the technology has recently received backing from the U.S. Department of Defense, which is part of the next step towards scaling up its usage.

Ultimately, once governments are on board with wireless power technology, its usage can really start to expand and its full potential to amplify clean energy production—especially when combined with other green energy solutions—will be revealed.