this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
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It's not electricity per se which is transmitted, i.e., electrons which pass through some material (like in cables, or through air when a lightning strikes and the air becomes a plasma through the electric ionization process).
It is radio waves. Electromagnetic waves of a specific spectrum. Like light, WiFi, TV signals (via antenna), Lasers, etc..
It is a form of energy transmission.
There is a whole field about wireless power transfer. One of them some use everyday: wireless inductive chargers for some smartphones or electric toothbrushes. Those rely on the Lorentz force: if you create a varying magnetic field on the one side and have a coil on the other, you can transfer energy. Read up on Lorentz forces and magnetic induction if you want to learn more. Faraday's law of induction would be another good read.
Regarding the spacey stuff, that's trickier. Applying Lorentz principles here on such a scale would be extremely inefficient and probably dangerous as you would need to create an enormous magnetic field. So using focused beams of radio waves has much less losses. Depending on the type of radiation, or wavelength to be more precise, microwaves or even lasers are used for the transmission, whereas microwaves are preferred due to less atmospheric scatterings. They are not allowed be too strong as that would pose several hazards. Instead it has signal strenghts which are safe. To maximize throughput multiple beams could be used.
Important: this is now electromagnetic stuff, not purely magnetic stuff as with the inductive chargers.
So how does this work from source to receiver?
Done.
In theory, we absolutely could do that. This has some practical limitations though which makes it more complicated and less efficient.
Transferring energy on a more "horziontal" way on earth would need to overcome a plethora of obstacles like buildings or mountains. Furthermore such long range transmissions would suffer from a lot more atmospheric scattering, be sensitive to moisture and weather conditions etc. Also, we would need to have large antennas and tightly focused beams which is a big technical challenge and would further loose efficiency, especially over long dictances.
We would also need to guarantee much more "safe corridors" to efficiently transmit without causing harm. And over long distances within the atmosphere the beams must be much stronger to effectively carry enough energy, as much is lost due to scattering, absorption etc.. From space a lot of these difficulties don't exist or don't have such a large impact. On very short distances should be less of a problem.
I can imagine, however, transferring energy into space to a satellite, which then forwards it to another receiver at a very different place on earth. Such relay satellite concepts are also not new as I've seen. They've just not been made yet. But that's surely just a question of time. They face further challenges, since at each intermediate power station you have energy losses, but they could provide much more flexibility. I don't see this as an issue which can't be overcome.
Sry if this answer isn't really polished. I tried to convey the most important aspects and am too tired for anything more. Hope this helps.