On a blustery November day, a Cessna turboprop flew over Pennsylvania at 5,000 meters, in crosswinds of up to 70 knots—nearly as fast as the little plane was flying. But the bumpy conditions didn’t thwart its mission: to wirelessly beam power down to receivers on the ground as it flew by.

The test flight marked the first time power has been beamed from a moving aircraft. It was conducted by the Ashburn, Va.-based startup Overview Energy, which emerged from stealth mode in December by announcing the feat.

But the greater purpose of the flight was to demonstrate the feasibility of a much grander ambition: to beam power from space to Earth. Overview plans to launch satellites into geosynchronous orbit (GEO) to collect unfiltered solar energy where the sun never sets and then beam this abundance back to humanity. The solar energy would be transferred as near-infrared waves and received by existing solar panels on the ground.

The far-flung strategy, known as space-based solar power, has become the subject of both daydreaming and serious research over the past decade. Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project launched a demonstration mission in 2023 that transferred power in space using microwaves. And terrestrial power beaming is coming along too. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in July 2025 set a new record for wirelessly transmitting power: 800 watts over 8.6 kilometers for 30 seconds using a laser beam.

But until November, no one had actively beamed power from a moving platform to a ground receiver.

Wireless Power Beaming Goes Airborne

Overview’s test transferred only a sprinkling of power, but it did it with the same components and techniques that the company plans to send to space. “Not only is it the first optical power beaming from a moving platform at any substantial range or power,” says Overview CEO Marc Berte, “but also it’s the first time anyone’s really done a power beaming thing where it’s all of the functional pieces all working together. It’s the same methodology and function that we will take to space and scale up in the long term.”

The approach was compelling enough that power-beaming expert Paul Jaffe left his job as a program manager at DARPA to join the company as head of systems engineering. Prior to DARPA, Jaffe spent three decades with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

“This actually sounds like it could work.” –Paul Jaffe

It was hearing Berte explain Overview’s plan at a conference that helped to convince Jaffe to take a chance on the startup. “This actually sounds like it could work,” Jaffe remembers thinking at the time. “It really seems like it gets around a lot of the showstoppers for a lot of the other concepts. I remember coming home and telling my wife that I almost felt like the problem had been solved. So I thought: Should [I] do something which is almost unheard of—to leave in the middle of being a DARPA program manager—to try to do something else?”

For Jaffe, the most compelling reason was in Overview’s solution for space-based solar’s power-density problem. A beam with low power density is safer because it’s not blasting too much concentrated energy onto a single spot on the Earth’s surface, but it’s less efficient for the task of delivering usable solar energy. A higher-density beam does the job better, but then the researchers must engineer some way to maintain safety.

Startup Overview Energy demonstrates how space-based solar power could be beamed to Earth from satellites. Overview Energy

Space-Based Solar Power Makes Waves

Many researchers have settled on microwaves as their beam of choice for wireless power. But, in addition to the safety concerns about shooting such intense waves at the Earth, Jaffe says there’s another problem: Microwaves are part of what he calls the “beachfront property” of the electromagnetic spectrum—a range from 2 to 20 gigahertz that is set aside for many other applications, such as 5G cellular networks.

“The fact is,” Jaffe says, “if you somehow magically had a fully operational solar power satellite that used microwave power transmission in orbit today—and a multi-kilometer-scale microwave power satellite receiver on the ground magically in place today—you could not turn it on because the spectrum is not allocated to do this kind of transmission.”

Instead, Overview plans to use less-dense, wide-field infrared waves. Existing utility-scale solar farms would be able to receive the beamed energy just like they receive the sun’s energy during daylight hours. So “your receivers are already built,” Berte says. The next major step is a prototype demonstrator for low Earth orbit, after which he hopes to have GEO satellites beaming megawatts of power by 2030 and gigawatts by later that decade.

Plenty of doubts about the feasibility of space-based power abound. It is an exotic technology with much left to prove, including the ability to survive orbital debris and the exorbitant cost of launching the power stations. (Overview’s satellite will be built on Earth in a folded configuration, and it will unfold after it’s brought to orbit, according to the company.)

“Getting down the cost per unit mass for launch is a big deal,” Jaffe says. “Then, it just becomes a question of increasing the specific power. A lot of the technologies we’re working on at Overview are squarely focused on that.”

Charging an EV at home doesn’t seem like an inconvenience—until you find yourself dragging a cord around a garage or down a rainy driveway, then unplugging and coiling it back up every time you drive the kids to school or run an errand. For elderly or disabled drivers, those bulky cords can be a physical challenge.

As it was for smartphones years ago, wireless EV charging has been the dream. But there’s a difference of nearly four orders of magnitude between the roughly 14 watt-hours of a typical smartphone battery and that of a large EV. That’s what makes the wireless charging on the 108-kilowatt-hour pack in the forthcoming Porsche Cayenne Electric so notable.

To offer the first inductive charger on a production car, Porsche had to overcome both technical and practical challenges—such as how to protect a beloved housecat prowling below your car. The German automaker demonstrated the system at September’s IAA Mobility show in Munich.

With its 800-volt architecture, the Cayenne Electric can charge at up to 400 kW at a public DC station, enough to fill its pack from 10 to 80 percent in about 16 minutes. The wireless system delivers about 11 kW for Level 2 charging at home, where Porsche says three out of four of its customers do nearly all their fill-ups. Pull the Cayenne into a garage and align it over a floor-mounted plate, and the SUV will charge from 10 to 80 percent in about 7.5 hours. No plugs, tangled cords, or dirty hands. Porsche will offer a single-phase, 48-ampere version for the United States after buyers see their first Cayennes in mid-2026, and a three-phase, 16-A system in Europe.

Porsche’s Wireless Charging is Based on an Old Concept

The concept of inductive charging has been around for more than a century. Two coils of copper wire are positioned near one another. A current flowing through one coil creates a magnetic field, which induces voltage in the second coil.

In the Porsche system, the floor-mounted pad, 78 centimeters wide, plugs into the home’s electrical panel. Inside the pad, which weighs 50 kilograms, grid electricity (at 60 hertz in the United States, 50 Hz in most of the rest of the world) is converted to DC and then to high-frequency AC at 2,000 V.The resulting 85-kilohertz magnetic field extends from the pad to the Cayenne, where it is converted again to DC voltage.

The waterproof pad can also be placed outdoors, and the company says it’s unaffected by leaves, snow, and the like. In fact, the air-cooled pad can get warm enough to melt any snow, reaching temperatures as high as 50 °C.

The Cayenne’s onboard charging hardware mounts between its front electric motor and battery. The 15-kg induction unit wires directly into the battery.

In most EVs, plug-in (conductive) AC charging tops out at around 95 percent efficiency. Porsche says its wireless system delivers 90 percent efficiency, despite an air gap of roughly 12 to 18 cm between the pad and vehicle.

Last year, Oak Ridge National Laboratory transferred an impressive 270 kilowatts to a Porsche Taycan with 95 percent efficiency.

“We’re super proud that we’re just below conductive AC in charging efficiency,” says Simon Schulze, Porsche’s product manager for charging hardware. Porsche also beats inductive phone chargers, which typically max out at about 70 percent efficiency, Schulze says.

When the car gets within 7.5 meters of the charging pad, the Cayenne’s screen-based parking-assist system turns on automatically. Then comes a kind of video game that requires the driver to align a pair of green circles on-screen, one representing the car, the other the pad. It’s like a digital version of the tennis ball some people hang in their garage to gauge parking distance. There’s ample wiggle room, with tolerances of 20 cm left to right, and 15 cm fore and aft. “You can’t miss it,” according to Schulze.

Induction loops detect any objects between the charging plate and the vehicle; such objects, if they’re metal, could heat up dangerously. Radar sensors detect any living things near the pad, and will halt the charging if necessary. People can walk near the car or hop aboard without affecting a charging session.

Christian Holler, Porsche’s head of charging systems, says the system conforms to International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection standards for electromagnetic radiation. The field remains below 15 microteslas, so it’s safe for people with pacemakers, Porsche insists. And the aforementioned cat wouldn’t be harmed even if it strayed into the magnetic field, though “its metal collar might get warm,” Schulze says.

The Porsche system’s 90 percent efficiency is impressive but not record-setting. Last year, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) transferred 270 kW to a Porsche Taycan with 95 percent efficiency, boosting its state of charge by 50 percent in 10 minutes. That world-record wireless rate relied on polyphase windings for coils, part of a U.S. Department of Energy project that was backed by Volkswagen, Porsche’s parent company.

That effort, Holler says, spawned a Ph.D. paper from VW engineer Andrew Foote. Yet the project had different goals from the one that led to the Cayenne charging system. ORNL was focused on maximum power transfer, regardless of cost, production feasibility, or reliability, he says.

By contrast, designing a system for showroom cars “requires a completely different level of quality and processes,” Holler says.

High Cost Could Limit Adoption

Cayenne buyers in Europe will pay around €7,000 (roughly US $8,100) for the optional charger. Porsche has yet to price it for the United States.

Loren McDonald, chief executive of Chargeonomics, an EV-charging analysis firm, said wireless charging “is clearly the future,” with use cases such as driverless robotaxis, curbside charging, or at any site “where charging cables might be an annoyance or even a safety issue.”

But for now, inductive charging’s costly, low-volume status will limit it to niche models and high-income adopters, McDonald says. Public adoption will be critical “so that drivers can convenience-charge throughout their driving day—which then increases the benefits of spending more money on the system.”

Porsche acknowledges that issue; the system conforms to wireless standards set by the Society of Automotive Engineers so that other automakers might help popularize the technology.

“We didn’t want this to be proprietary, a Porsche-only solution,” Schulze says. “We only benefit if other brands use it.”