The Technology That Could End Every Cable Forever

I read about wireless charging online a while back.

My honest reaction at the time: interesting, but limited.

Phones. earbuds at most. A small convenience upgrade. Nothing that changes anything fundamental.

Turns out I had the wrong picture in my head.

This week, I found out it's happening at three completely different scales. Scales that I never connected to each other.

Roads in Detroit charge cars while they drive.

Japan is building a satellite to beam solar power from orbit.

DARPA is firing a laser across 8.6 kilometres to power a military outpost.

Same underlying technology. Three completely different worlds.

And none of them requires a cable.

FIRST TIME HERE?

First time reading about wireless power transfer? Skip to the bottom of this issue. I explain the basics in plain English — before the footer. 2 minutes. Come back up after.

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My first instinct was — cool, but likely years away.

That instinct was wrong. Some of this is already here. Some of it is closer than I expected.

At CES 2026, a company called WARP Solutions showed up with something unusual. They called it "Wi-Fi for electricity."

Radio frequency (RF)-based wireless power. 3 watts. Up to 6 meters away. 60% efficiency.

You walk into a room. Your devices charge. No pad. No cable. No contact.

Just power — in the air.

Another company — Etherdyne — showed a cord-free zone. A laptop is charging at 50W. Phones. Peripherals. All simultaneously. No wires anywhere in the room.

Portless smartphones are being explored. Patents filed. Designs prototyped. Whether it becomes standard depends on charging speeds, regulations, and consumer acceptance. Not guaranteed. But the work is happening.

The cable is not dying all at once. It is becoming unnecessary one device at a time.

A quarter mile of road. 14th Street in Detroit.

Electromagnetic coils embedded in the road surface.

When an electric vehicle drives over it, the road charges the battery.

No stopping. No plugging in. Just driving.

The City of Detroit and Michigan's Department of Transportation are the confirmed partners.

This is not a startup experiment. This is infrastructure.

Efficiency is being tested in real conditions.

Purdue University tested it for trucks. 190 kilowatts. Highway speed. 65 mph. Indiana's Department of Transportation funded the test. On a real road. While moving. Sweden has bus lane pilots. Michigan is testing truck wireless charging.

The charging cable for electric vehicles may never become standard. The road is becoming the charger. Not a metaphor. An actual road. Actual coils. Actual electricity.

Japan's OHISAMA satellite has one job. Convert sunlight into microwaves. Beam them down to receivers on the ground.

OHISAMA was scheduled for fiscal 2026. While some reports suggest a launch later in 2026, official confirmation of a successful in-orbit transmission has not yet been released.

But Japan tested the concept on an aircraft on December 12, 2024. Initial reports indicate the test demonstrated the approach.

JAXA, NASA, and private companies all have roadmaps for this. The shared target: gigawatt-scale power from orbit. The mid-2040s is the target most organisations are working toward. The technical and economic hurdles are still significant.

A solar panel in orbit can collect up to 8 times as much energy as one on Earth, depending on conditions.

The orbital test hasn't happened yet. But the groundwork is being laid.

Every article about wireless charging covers the consumer story.

Phones. Laptops. EVs. Convenient. Clean. Cord-free.

Nobody covers this part.

Not a weapon. A power line.

April 2025. White Sands Missile Range. New Mexico.

800 watts of laser power. 8.6 kilometers. 30 seconds in a single test. Over 1 megajoule delivered across the full test campaign. End-to-end efficiency: around 20%.

Teravec Technologies built the receiver. It used a parabolic mirror and solar cells to convert the laser back into electricity.

The design includes safety measures, including a beam shutoff if an obstruction is detected.

This is the POWER program. Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay.

The goal: A wireless energy web over battlefields.

Drones and aircraft acting as relays. Routing power from secure hubs to wherever it's needed. No delay.

In modern warfare, fuel convoys get targeted first.

Soldiers die protecting them. Ambushes. IEDs. Logistics chains stretched across hostile territory.

A wireless energy web makes fuel convoys unnecessary.

No convoy. No target. No soldiers guarding a fuel truck in a warzone.

The same technology charges your laptop. It is also being built to keep soldiers alive.

DARPA is already planning Phase 2. Airborne transmission from aircraft to ground.

A wireless power line in the sky.

And DARPA began pulling in commercial partners, including Teravec Technologies.

The military technology and the consumer technology are converging.

They usually do. GPS started as a military application. The internet started in the military. Now, wireless power is following the same path.

I went in thinking wireless power transfer was being built for everything electrical.

Turns out the answer is more specific. And the order in which it arrives matters more than I realised.

Stage 1 — Already here: Phone charging. Earbuds. Smartwatches. Inductive pads. No drama.

Stage 2 — Arriving now: Room-scale wireless power. Laptops. Internet of Things (IoT) devices. No cables anywhere. WARP Solutions. Etherdyne. CES 2026.

Stage 3 — Infrastructure scale: Roads that charge vehicles. Detroit. Indiana. Michigan. Sweden. Expensive right now. Costs will drop as the technology scales. Smaller batteries are needed.

Stage 4 — Coming by 2030: Megawatt-scale wireless from aircraft. DARPA Phase 2.

Stage 5 — Mid-2030s: Gigawatt-scale power from orbit. Japan. Caltech. Space agencies worldwide.

Each stage makes the previous one look small.

Wireless power at phone scale — regulators say it's fine.

At the road scale, nobody has finalized the safety standards yet. How close can a person stand to a charging road? Still being worked out.

At the space scale, nobody has written those rules yet.

Some analyses argue that current RF exposure limits need updating. Others say existing limits are fine. Major health agencies haven't moved.

The technology is scaling faster than the regulations.

I don't know who is right about the safety debate. But I noticed something. The faster this technology moves, the quieter that debate gets.

That's worth tracking.

The Detroit pilot cost around $2 million per mile. A full highway deployment in Indiana came in at an estimated $6.3 to $6.5 million per mile. Government-funded in both cases.

Private companies build the technology. Governments pay for the roads.

That's the same model as regular roads. And regular power grids. And the internet backbone.

The question nobody is asking yet:

When the road is also a power line — who owns it? Who controls the price? Who decides which vehicles get to charge and which don't?

Right now, nobody has answered that.

Three decisions in 2025-2026 will define how wireless power scales.

DARPA's POWER program leads the world in long-range wireless power right now. Nothing else is close.

800 watts over 8.6 kilometres. Already demonstrated. Phase 2 is already planned.

The US approach: Fund the military application first. Let the technology transfer to commercial use after.

This is exactly how GPS worked. Exactly how the internet worked. Exactly how radar became microwave ovens.

Military first. Consumer second. Always.

Japan's OHISAMA is the most ambitious civilian wireless power project alive. Nothing else comes close in scope.

Beaming power from orbit. Targeting gigawatt-scale by mid-2030s.

The Japanese approach: Solve the hardest problem first. If you can beam power from space — everything else is easier.

Detroit. Indiana. Michigan. Sweden. South Korea. Israel's Electreon.

The road-charging approach is the most immediately practical. Existing infrastructure. Existing vehicles. Existing grid connections.

Just add coils under the pavement.

The bet: EVs become the killer application for wireless power. Once roads charge cars, the technology scales to everything else.

Military laser webs. Space solar satellites. Electric roads.

All wireless power transfer. All converging toward the same future.

A world where the cable is a historical artefact.

Like the telegram wire. Like the film camera. Like the landline telephone.

Here but gone. Replaced by something invisible.

I started this research thinking wireless power was a convenience upgrade.

A minor upgrade for your phone. Nothing more.

I ended it thinking about something bigger.

Every major infrastructure shift in history followed the same pattern.

First, it was a curiosity. Then it was a military application. Then it was infrastructure. Then it was invisible.

Electricity followed this pattern. The internet followed this pattern. GPS followed this pattern.

Wireless power is following it now.

We are somewhere between military application and infrastructure.

Detroit already has a wireless road. Japan is building one — not yet launched. DARPA already has a laser power line.

The curiosity phase is over.

The infrastructure phase is starting.

The invisible phase is roughly 20 years away. That's the phase where you stop noticing it. Where it's just how the world works.

Your children will not know what a charging cable was.

You don't think about how electricity reaches your house. It arrives. You use it. That's all.

Wireless power will just do that, too.

Right now — in 2026 — someone is deciding who builds this. Who owns it? Who controls the price?

Those decisions are happening now. Not in 20 years. Now.

That is exactly why this newsletter exists.

Every other Saturday. One technology I went deep on, so you get the version that matters. Documented before it becomes obvious.

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Search: "Electreon Detroit wireless road"

Read any one article about it. Takes 5 minutes.

It is the clearest sign that wireless power has left the lab. It is now infrastructure.

A quarter mile of road. In a real city. Charging real vehicles. Right now.

Most people talking about EVs and charging networks have never heard of this project.

Your 2087 self will remember this week. A quarter mile of road in Detroit. Already charging electric vehicles. You found out before it was obvious. The pilot exists. The scale-up is the question.

Before you go — a quick explanation for first-time readers.

Wireless power transfer sounds complicated. The core idea isn't.

You already understand it.

When you hold two magnets close together, you feel a force without touching them.

That force travels through the air. Wireless power works the same way.

Instead of magnetic force, it's energy.

A coil of wire carries electricity. That creates a magnetic field. Another coil nearby picks up that field. And converts it back into electricity.

No contact. No cable. Just a field — invisible — carrying power through air.

That's inductive charging. That's how your phone charges on a wireless pad today.

Now scale that up.

Bigger coils. More power. Longer distances. Different frequencies.

Roads charging cars. Rooms with charging laptops. Satellites aim microwaves at Earth. Lasers crossing kilometres of open air.

Same principle. Completely different scales.

Nikola Tesla worked out the physics in the 1890s. The math is the same. Only the engineering changed.

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THE 2087 REPORT Documenting the decade that builds the next century.

Published every other Saturday. Written for people paying attention.

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