A lot of people with proposals in this direction (most with only vague understanding about how electricity works, sadly) are wildly optimistic about the efficiency of wireless power transfer and wildly pessimistic about the efficiency of physical wires. I don't think wireless power transmission will ever replace large scale power transmission for terrestrial applications for example. It is also not very useful for powering small devices in (say) a room because the rectenna array need to be "facing" the transmitter and you can't guarantuee that for a phone in a pocket. You can make it up by increasing the power, but it's easy to show that it would need to transmit dangerous amount of EM radiation to get a reasonable amount of power to the device(s) in all scenarios. Hence the debunking.
That said, if transmission efficiency is not your absolute main concern (such as would be the case when powering a drone) and you can control the attitude of the receiver array then it can absolutely be done. Apparently a Canadian research institute built a rectenna-powered plane all the way back in 1987 that could stay aloft for months. If I would go into a project like this it'd be interesting to see why they didn't continue with this and why "modern" long endurance drones typically go for solar cells on the wings instead. Tech-wise, getting some basic arrays up and running would be a good idea too. Finally, I can imagine that a certain amount of political goodwill would be needed as well, since high power phased arrays and long endurance drones have obvious military applications and most governments like to keep a tight lid on military tech (for good reasons).
Current field is working as a combined Ruby/SRE freelancer, helping local startups fix speed up their test suites and fixing the sometimes terrible SQL queries ActiveRecord can spit out if you are not careful. Quite different from my previous field but a lot more freedom :)
That said, if transmission efficiency is not your absolute main concern (such as would be the case when powering a drone) and you can control the attitude of the receiver array then it can absolutely be done. Apparently a Canadian research institute built a rectenna-powered plane all the way back in 1987 that could stay aloft for months. If I would go into a project like this it'd be interesting to see why they didn't continue with this and why "modern" long endurance drones typically go for solar cells on the wings instead. Tech-wise, getting some basic arrays up and running would be a good idea too. Finally, I can imagine that a certain amount of political goodwill would be needed as well, since high power phased arrays and long endurance drones have obvious military applications and most governments like to keep a tight lid on military tech (for good reasons).
Current field is working as a combined Ruby/SRE freelancer, helping local startups fix speed up their test suites and fixing the sometimes terrible SQL queries ActiveRecord can spit out if you are not careful. Quite different from my previous field but a lot more freedom :)