The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), part of the US Department of Defense, is researching and developing remote power generation technology via lasers, stemming from the continuous energy needs of forward bases in remote areas.
Famed inventor Nikola Tesla first proposed a method of transmitting wireless power in the 1890s, believing it would become the standard for transmitting power from one point to another. Yet, more than 100 years later, humans have yet to put the idea into practical use.
Currently, power is still transmitted by wires, or through diesel engines that convert fuel into electricity. In war zones, where power lines or fuel supply lines are often blocked by enemy forces, the military has to transport diesel by truck or drop it from planes.
Colonel Paul “Promo” Calhoun, one of the pilots who participated in the balloon drop mission to resupply the special forces and is the program manager of DARPA’s POWER (wireless power relay) project, said that the time is right to put wireless power transmission technology into use, and predicted that the technology will be fully developed within the next four years.
“There is a pressing need for a flexible way to deliver power to military operations. Many units operate radars, microwave weapons, and anti-drone lasers at remote bases, and there is no easy way to power these operations,” Calhoun said.
The officer revealed that the US has made significant progress in high-energy lasers, wave sensors, adaptive optics, overhead electromagnetic transmission platforms, and other technical elements to bring the idea from theory to reality.
Aerial power transmission network
The key technology of the POWER project is the use of high-power lasers, transmitted from above, through relays with a non-modulating steering function, to end-user signal receivers, before converting into electricity using narrow-band tunable monochromatic photovoltaic technology.
With this technology, relays play an important role as a bridge to create multi-directional, flexible and durable wireless energy networks. DARPA believes that this could revolutionize energy distribution.
Drones/UAVs are also one of those relays. In theory, UAVs are capable of flying around a location at high altitudes, taking on the task of transmitting lasers to each other over long distances and finally sending them down to a military base on the ground.
Meanwhile, a satellite network could become a laser power distribution network. “POWER is developing stratospheric platforms with a range of 100 kilometers between nodes. In space, the node distance could be up to 1,000 kilometers. So the project could be scalable on a global scale,” Calhoun shared.
POWER is said to have fewer weaknesses than traditional methods, such as transport planes being shot down and fuel trucks being vulnerable to mines. In particular, lasers are immune to current jamming methods that are making waves in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
“Jamming or interfering with the energy transmission signal only increases the strength of the signal because the energy beams are inherently very narrowly oriented, leaving very few vulnerabilities for the enemy to exploit,” said the project manager.
DARPA has conducted multiple tests of laser power transmission between sites. The agency is optimistic that the POWER system will be ready within four years, with low-power airborne demonstrations around 2025 and full-scale high-power demonstrations as soon as 2027.
(According to PopMech)
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