Energy Harvesting – wireless power?

Since a wireless charger (RCA Airnergy) was announces at CES that harvests energy from wifi signals that are around the topic is everywhere in the (tech) news. It is an exciting prospective to imagine mobile devices that will recharge themselves from the environment they are in. However I am not sure how well harvesting energy from RF will worked in regular environments – not saturated with radio signals.

The topic is really exciting – and in the end people probably do not care much if the energy is harvested from their movement, from light, temperature or RF – as long as it works. There is a introductory article to energy harvesting by Joe Paradiso and Thad Starner [1] which is worthwhile to read.

[1] Joseph A. Paradiso, Thad Starner, „Energy Scavenging for Mobile and Wireless Electronics,“ IEEE Pervasive Computing, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 18-27, Jan.-Mar. 2005, doi:10.1109/MPRV.2005.9

New Power Plug in the Street – charging your e-car

Why would I write a post about a power plug? Perhaps in some years this may be so common that we do not know when the first appeared 😉 And here is my reference point for Essen, Germany.
There is a German news article about these chargeing points – there are 22 in Essen and they started sometime back in Berlin (where they plan to have 500 by the end of the year).

It looks very much like an ordinary power plug and I have not figured out how it really works – e.g. How to pay? How to reserve that parking in front of it? How to make sure that nobody unplugs may car and used my energy to drive a huge stereo? We will probably see how it works over the next months. I will add a new post when I actually see a car recharging there.

new post on the topic:
http://albrecht-schmidt.blogspot.com/2009/08/update-on-e-cars.html