We can charge phones wirelessly. What about electric vehicles?
The biggest obstacle to an all-electric-vehicle future seems to be the batteries. But some companies and researchers think the future would be less reliant on big batteries if we could develop cost-effective ways to charge vehicles wirelessly, and Resonant Link is doing just that.
One of those companies is Resonant Link. At its headquarters deep in an office park in South Burlington, Vermont, Resonant Link‘s verification manager, Jonathan Chia, wheels a cart covered in coils and wires — a prototype, really — toward a sleek, black pad with what looks like a neon-green bull’s-eye in the center. “If you imagine an Amazon or a Walmart fulfillment center, or maybe a warehouse today, they have these aisles — which are called racks — and vehicles work up and down one of these aisles,” said Resonant Link CEO Grayson Zulauf.Those vehicles are often electric forklifts, and they spend a lot of downtime plugged into a wall charging, Zulauf said. So, Resonant Link wants to install its wireless chargers along the aisles where those forklifts work.“It’ll power that forklift when it pulls up from the side,” Zulauf said. The forklift makes a bunch of stops as it picks up and drops off items. “And as the forklift goes up and down this aisle moving goods, where it already stops, it gets power.”
