How Wireless Energy From Space Could Power Everything | Ali Hajimiri | TED

233,550 views ・ 2023-06-06

TED


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Energy and data are the major currencies of our lives today.
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Over the last couple of decades,
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we've seen data going from being wired to becoming wireless.
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And this has helped democratize access to information.
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Can we do the same thing with energy?
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Can we send energy when we want,
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where we want and as much as we want
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and in the process, eliminate the last wire?
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If we could do this, the possibilities would be endless.
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From Earth to space.
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I'd like to tell you about our dream of wireless energy transfer today.
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It starts with something we are all familiar with -- waves.
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So waves are very essential to our lives.
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You can hear this talk because of acoustic waves.
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You can see this talk
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because of a certain kind of electromagnetic waves, called light.
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And the odds are, if you're watching it on the internet,
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you're using some sort of wireless connectivity
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that relies on wireless and RF waves.
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If you have two waves that have the same frequency
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and are going up and down
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and they come together at some point in space,
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they will add and make a wave that's twice the height
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but carries four times the energy.
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Now, if the same two waves come together at some other place in space,
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but one is running half a period late,
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they cancel
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and you get very little energy, practically no energy.
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This is the basis for a process that has been known for a long time.
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It's called interference.
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The idea here is that if you go and sit at the edge of a pond
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and take both hands and put them in the water
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and move them up and down, each hand makes a wave.
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But because of the interaction of these waves,
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there will be some directions where you get more energy
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and there are some directions that you will get less.
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Can we make it go only in one direction?
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Well, you need more hands.
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And they have to go perfectly synchronized.
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But if you do that,
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what happens is that most of your energy starts traveling straight down.
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Now, this is a remarkable thing
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because if you think about each one of those little hands,
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each one of those little sources,
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they would send energy all over the place.
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But when they work together,
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the result is that the energy is going mostly in one direction.
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Now, if the timing was the reason for this happening,
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maybe we can play with it.
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Maybe we can mess with it and see what happens.
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So what if each one of these sources
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goes a little bit after the one next to it?
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So in that case,
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what happens is that these waves start going in different directions,
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and you can change that direction
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purely by controlling timing and nothing else.
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Now, this makes it possible to change this direction
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without any mechanical movement.
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So it can be almost instantaneous.
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You can go even further.
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You can think about creating a magnifying glass.
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A focusing system,
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where you can actually send the energy,
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most of it, close to 90 percent of it, in one focal point.
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But again, since you're controlling the timing,
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you can create different focal points, and you can send it to them.
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And this is the basis for wireless energy transfer.
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It's as if you have an army of ants
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that are working in perfect synchronization.
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And each one of them contributes a little bit of energy.
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But as a whole, they send it to the right place.
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Now,
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obviously here, timing is everything, like life and comedy.
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(Laughter)
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So we’ve taken this concept,
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and we've built these electronic chips, integrated circuits,
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that each one of them generates a little bit of power.
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But again, as a group, they are designed to work in perfect synchronization
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and drive these little antennas that transmit the energy.
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Now this army of ants, or army of antennas,
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is working together to create those focal points of energy.
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And what I will show you next
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is some examples of how that actually operates.
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So what you have here, for example,
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is a generator unit that's sending power wirelessly to the two receivers.
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And here the point is to see how well-defined these focal points are.
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That LED panel basically is receiving that power and showing it.
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So you can see energy is going only where it needs to go and nowhere else.
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You can take this and put one of these generators
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on the ceiling of your conference room or your living room
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and transmit energy to various devices that need energy.
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Now this generator on the ceiling is going to power a light bulb.
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Now, as we move the light bulb,
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what happens is that you see
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that there's no energy in the new location,
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but the system finds it, tracks it
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and sends it to the new location.
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And you can see that it dynamically tracks it back and forth.
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You can use this to send energy to one light bulb
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or to the next one or to both of them at the same time.
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Now you can use something like this, for example, to power a drone.
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This is a battery-less drone
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that's being purely powered by that generator
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facing up from the bottom.
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And it can also use the same tracking approach to track the drone.
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So now that we know that we can send energy wirelessly,
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the question is, how far can we go?
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Really, how far can we go?
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Could we put photovoltaics in space,
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solar panels in space,
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and collect the energy and send that wirelessly to Earth?
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This is not a new idea.
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The first time it was mentioned,
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it was in a short science-fiction story by Isaac Asimov from 1941.
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And what I love about this story is that
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it's about a self-conscious robot.
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And the humans describing this idea to the self-conscious robot,
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after which the robot says,
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"Do you expect me to believe such a far-fetched, crazy notion?
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What do you take me for?"
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The first question almost always asked is that,
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“Why do you want to put your solar panels in space?
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Why don’t you put them up in the desert and be done with it?” Right?
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A few reasons.
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First is that in space you get about eight times more energy
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because you don't have day and night,
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you don't have clouds, you don't have seasons,
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and you don't have the atmospheric absorption.
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Also, now that you have this ability to send energy where you want
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and when you want dynamically,
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you can imagine that you have dispatchable power.
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On top of that,
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it's an always-available power.
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This can be used for a place, for example,
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let's say an island hit by a hurricane
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where there’s no power.
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Or a city in war zone
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where the power infrastructure is being constantly attacked.
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You can think about using this to send power
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to a remote village in sub-Saharan Africa
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where there is no infrastructure for power transmission.
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And that way democratize the access to energy.
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Or send it somewhere above the Arctic circle.
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So all of these things are great.
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But the question is,
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if it has been known for such a long time and it's such a great thing,
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why hasn't it been done so far?
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The main reason is that the way it has been envisioned before,
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they've been thinking about it as a big elephant.
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If you're thinking about putting big solar panels in space,
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collecting the power, generating a lot of energy,
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and then putting it into a massive parabolic dish antenna
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and sending it to a fixed location on Earth.
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Sending things to space is expensive.
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You pay dollars -- and that's plural -- per gram.
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The other problem is that even if you could afford it,
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assembly of something like this in space
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is still beyond the capabilities that we have today.
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So we came up with a very different approach
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where we took our generators
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and turned them into flexible, fabric-like structures.
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We are utilizing the amazing power of electronics,
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integrated electronics and flexible electronics,
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to make this very lightweight, flexible, fabric-like structures
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that you can roll and pack.
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And this allows you to have these satellites packed for launch
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and deployed in space,
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where each one of these units
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would be about several tens of meters on the side.
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And then you can pack a whole bunch of them
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and create a constellation of them
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that flies in space
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and forms your power station to send green energy to Earth.
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This will be flying in formation around the Earth.
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Obviously, this is not the size of the planet
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because we're talking about a kilometer across for the whole whole constellation
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and the planet is a little bit larger than a kilometer.
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We've been developing, as a proof of concept,
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technology demonstrator,
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and this is called Maple,
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which demonstrates the power of flexible structures
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and electronic circuitry
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to generate and transmit power in space.
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We integrated that with two other technology demonstrators
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for deployable structures and photovoltaics
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that were developed by three teams,
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led by myself and two of my colleagues.
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And we integrated into a satellite that was launched recently.
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And the purpose of this experiment
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has been to demonstrate the power transfer,
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wireless power transfer in space.
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Now that brings me back to the promise of wireless energy transfer
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and what it could mean for us.
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I believe this technology is too compelling to go away.
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And I believe it's bound to appear in our lives in one form or another.
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And that is something to look forward to.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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