I suggest that you ballpark how many Teslas you expect to be on the road during a given time and place (say, a 1-mile stretch of highway during rush hour), and compute how much square footage of flying solar panel you're suggesting putting into the air, assuming 100%-efficient transmission of power given the current best efficiency of solar panel. (From there it's easy to compute what it would take given less than 100%-perfect transmission.)
I'm not just being rhetorical... try it. It's fun.
Can the idea be combined with that tech; sorry forgot the name; being demonstrated for cell phones where many small antennae track where the target cell phone is to improve signal quality?
Instead of free beaming, give each device a beacon so it can be located? (I am really not even familiar with viability of any wireless charging solution so shooting from the hip here)
Don't talk about downvotes, and don't worry about them. Some users will actively look for things which have been unfairly downvoted and try to correct. If you're angsting about one or two people who dislike what you've said, you're already over-thinking it.
I don't like techcrunch, I expect very little to no journalism from them. But that was one of the worst written, contentless, fluff writing bordering on vapid that I have had poor fortune to read.
I really wish people who talk about wireless charging would do some math.
To get any efficiency, you need to tightly constrain the EM field, at which point, you are effectively hitting a plug anyway.
Or, you are accepting enormous radiative losses and losing massive amounts of power. Doubling or tripling the power draw in every device just so it's powered wirelessly is a non-starter.
For cars, we're more likely to get automated charging stations that just plug themselves in. That's going to be a useful problem to solve.
Out of curiosity, how much does it typically cost to charge, say, an iPhone5? For some (many?) doubling this price might not be as much of a non-starter as you think.
No clue how efficient typical USB charging is, the AC-DC conversion is at around 80%, then you've got the battery chemistry which cursory research seems to peg at around 80% efficiency as well. So lets say it's about 1c per charge, at EU power prices.
Doubling is an underestimate. It's more like a factor of 10.
Still, multiplying the cost of charging an iPhone by 10 isn't bad. And in fact you can buy a lot of solutions that enable this, because you're right, it's not a big deal for a lot of people, and the convenience is worth the cost.
For an electric car, increasing the charging cost by a factor of 10, or even a factor of 2, is a much tougher proposition.
Furthermore, Any reduction in the efficiency of electrical systems for (slight) convenience gains seems like a Bad Idea right now. If we were awash in clean energy (and weren't worried about thermal pollution) then ... maybe.
