The 5G network has the potential to achieve the dream that obsessed Tesla more than a century ago. At the height of his career, the brilliant engineer Nikola Tesla became obsessed with an idea. He theorized that electricity could be transmitted wirelessly through the air at long distances – either via a series of strategically positioned towers, or hopping across a system of suspended balloons.
Things did not go according to his ideas, and Tesla’s ambitions to provide the world with wireless electricity were never realized. But the theory itself was not refuted: it would simply have required an extraordinary amount of power (electricity), much of which would have been wasted.
Now, new research (by scientists Elena Gaura and James Peter Brusey at Coventry University) suggests that 5G network architects may have unwittingly built what Tesla failed to construct at the turn of the twentieth century: a wireless electrical network that can be adapted to charge or power small devices embedded in cars, homes, workplaces and factories.
Because 5G relies upon a dense network of powerful antennas, it’s possible that the same infrastructure, with some modifications, could beam power to small devices. But the transmission will still suffer from the key drawback of Tesla’s towers: high energy wastage, which may be difficult to justify given the world’s energy crisis.
Decades ago, it was discovered that a tightly focused radio beam can transmit power over relatively large distances without using a wire to carry the charge. The same technology is now used in the 5G network: the latest generation of technology to beam internet connection to your mobile phone, via radio waves transmitted from a local antenna.
This 5G technology aims to provide a 1,000-fold capacity increase compared to the latest generation, 4G, to allow the connection of up to one million users per square kilometer. To achieve this, 5G uses a certain engineering “magic”, consisting of three parts: very dense networks, a special antenna technology and the inclusion of millimetre wave (mmWave) transmission alongside more traditional bands.
The millimeter waves, mmWave, open a much larger bandwidth, but the transmission distances are shorter. For example, most WiFi routers operate in the 2 GHz band. If your router has a 5 GHz option, you will notice that the Internet is running faster, but you need to be closer to the router to benefit from this quality. Increase the frequency even further (30 GHz) and see even greater bandwidth improvements, but you need to be even closer to the base station to access the Internet.
5G requires more antennas – between 128 and 1,024, compared to a much smaller number (just 2 in some cases) for 4G. Multiple antennas allow the formation of hundreds of beams, targeting particular devices, providing efficient and reliable Internet to your mobile phone on the move.
These are also the ingredients needed to create a wireless electrical network. The increased network density is particularly important, as it opens up the possibility of using mmWave bands to transmit different radio waves that can carry both information (Internet) and electricity.
Experimenting with 5G electricity
The experiments used new types of antennas to facilitate wireless charging. In the lab, researchers were able to beam 5G electricity over a relatively short distance (over 2 meters), but a future version of their device is expected to be able to transmit 6 microvits (6 million watts) at a distance of 180 meters.
Ordinary devices consume about 5 microvits, but only when in sleep mode. Of course, the devices will require less and less power to run, as more efficient intelligent algorithms are developed, but 6 microvits is still a very small amount of power.
This means, for the time being at least, that 5G wireless power is unlikely to be practical for charging your mobile phone. But it could charge or power other devices, such as sensors and alarms, that are expected to become widespread in the future.
That said, this technology is in its infancy. It’s certainly possible that future approaches, such as new antenna with narrower and more targeted beams, could significantly reduce the energy required.
Because it’ll consume a high amount of power compared to the power it’ll deliver to devices, 5G wireless power is, for the moment, speculative. But if engineers can find more efficient ways to beam electricity through the air, it may well be that Nikola Tesla’s dream of wireless power could be realised – over 100 years since his attempts failed.