The SunBreak on Jordin Kare and LaserMotive

Written by Tom Nugent on Saturday, November 28th, 2009

The SunBreak is a local Seattle paper, and last week they had a story (“Jordin Kare on His Laser-Powered Lifestyle, Space Elevators, and the Almighty Joystick” by Michael van Baker) about LaserMotive and Jordin Kare. It sets the tone in the first paragraph:

I often think of Seattle as a small town, but maybe it’s only in a city that I would not have known one of my neighbors on the next block was “freelance rocket scientist” Jordin Kare. He’s been living on Capitol Hill since March 2003, though his first visit to Seattle was back in 1979.

The awesome Doug Uttecht of Northwest Helicopters also gets a mention (Doug is the pilot who did all the great helicopter flying for the competition.

This paragraph highlights why we believe that power beaming is ripe to become a commercial product:

Terrestrial power beaming is just now becoming competitive on both the amount of power delivered and cost, in special instances. A laser power beaming system “delivers” about 20 percent of its electrical intake–about 50 percent of the incoming electricity is converted to light, and about 50 percent of that light is converted by photovoltaic sells back to electricity.

One application that has received a lot of attention is using power beaming to provide power to UAVs. We will talk more in the future about cases where power beaming makes economic sense.