Nikola Tesla told investors in 1901 that Wardenclyffe would carry power through the earth itself, to any point on the globe, without wires. He never delivered it. The tower came down in 1917 and the idea sat in the drawer marked “beautiful, impossible” for most of a century.
2026 has been the year that drawer got opened. Not by one lab, and not with one breakthrough, but by four or five groups pushing in different directions at the same time. Worth taking stock of where the numbers actually landed.
The scoreboard
Microwave, ground to ground. China’s Zhuri program reported 1,180 watts delivered over more than 100 meters to multiple moving targets, at 20.8 percent DC to DC efficiency. That is up from 15.05 percent on the same program in 2022. Beam collection hit 88 percent, which is the number that actually matters for safety and for not wasting most of your energy heating the sky. Full details here.
Optical, long distance. DARPA’s POWER program still holds the distance record from its White Sands campaign: more than 800 watts across 8.6 kilometers in a 30 second burst, with over a megajoule moved across the whole test series. Star Catcher then took the raw power record in late 2025, beaming more than 1.1 kilowatts into off-the-shelf commercial solar panels at Kennedy Space Center.
Commercial commitment. Meta reserved early access to up to a gigawatt of orbital solar capacity from Overview Energy. Virtus Solis signed terms on a 500 megawatt scale deployment. These are the first contracts anyone has signed for power that does not exist yet.
Defense adoption. Reach Power collected two separate awards in as many months, one for AI-managed drone swarms that never land and one for perched drones that recharge where they sit. Neither is a research curiosity. Both are procurement.
How that compares to Wardenclyffe
Tesla’s pitch was global, terrestrial, and conducted through the earth. Every working system today is line of sight and beamed, either microwave or laser. On the physics, Tesla was wrong about the mechanism. The ground does not behave the way he modeled it, and the ionosphere does not make a usable return path at the scales he described.
On the premise, he was right, and he was right early. Power can move without wire, at industrial scale, to a receiver that is not fixed in place. Every demonstration above proves that part of the claim. What changed is not the ambition, it is that solid state amplifiers, phased arrays, multi-junction photovoltaics and beam steering software all matured enough at once to make the ambition affordable.
What is still missing
Efficiency, mostly. Twenty percent end to end is a fine research number and a terrible utility number. A power company loses roughly 5 percent moving electricity down a wire. Nobody is replacing the grid at 20 percent.
Then there is scale. The longest optical link is 8.6 kilometers. Geostationary orbit is 35,786 kilometers. That is four orders of magnitude, and pointing accuracy has to hold below a microradian the entire way. Caltech and NASA have shown it is possible at milliwatt levels. Nobody has shown it at megawatt levels.
And regulation has not started. There is no spectrum allocation, no exposure standard, and no international framework for who is allowed to point a kilowatt-class beam at what. That will take longer than the engineering.
The honest read
Wireless power in 2026 is where solar was in about 1995. It works, it is expensive, it serves niches where the alternative is worse, and the cost curve is pointing the right way. Drones, remote sensors, satellites and lunar rovers are the niches. Your house is not on the list and will not be for a long time.
Tesla would have hated the timeline. He would have recognized the result.