The dawn of wireless electricity is finally upon us. This is how New Zealand will do it.

Picture the street outside your home. Now erase the power lines. Imagine national highways without the unsightly cable towers that dot the expansive landscape. This could be the wireless future of energy if a partnership between New Zealand’s government and a start-up called Emrod works out – and it all dates back to the wildest dreams of Nikola Tesla.

- By Caroline Delbert, Photography by Emrod

Wireless electricity might sound like science fiction, but the technology is already realised and primed for a utility-scale case study. In a first-of-its-kind pilot programme, Powerco – New Zealand’s second-largest electricity distributor – has been testing Emrod technology, a process that began in 2021.

The companies plan to deploy the prototype wireless energy infrastructure across a 40 m expanse. To make it possible, Emrod uses rectifying antennas, aka ‘rectennas’, that pass microwaves of electricity from one waypoint to the next: a solution well-suited to New Zealand’s mountainous terrain. Specialised square elements are mounted on intervening poles to act as pass-through points that keep the electricity humming along, and a broader surface area ‘catches’ the entire wave, so to speak.

‘We’ve developed a technology for long-range wireless power transmission,’ says Emrod founder Greg Kushnir. ‘The technology itself has been around for quite a while. It sounds futuristic and fantastic but has been an iterative process since Tesla.’