No recognised body has published a method for measuring whether a power beam meets the

exposure limits it must meet. One project was chartered to write it. That project has been

an Active PAR since June 2023, has no public draft, and its authorisation runs out in

December 2027.

This matters more than it sounds. Everyone arguing about power beaming argues about the

limit, and the limit is the settled part. What is missing is the boring half: where to put

the probe, over what area to average, and what a regulator accepts as proof that the fence

is in the right place.

A limit is not a method

Start with the numbers, because they are documented and they are not controversial.

ICNIRP's 2020 radiofrequency guidelines set a general public whole-body reference level of

10 W/m² incident power density between 2 and 300 GHz, averaged over 30 minutes, and 50 W/m²

for occupational exposure. IEEE Std C95.1-2019 is the second document to cite. Read on

27 September 2026, its IEEE SA page gives it as an Active Standard, board approval

8 February 2019, published 4 October 2019, with Cor 1-2019 and Cor 2-2020 as the only

corrigenda and the working group showing "No Active Projects".

Those documents tell you the number. They do not tell you how to obtain it in the field.

They do not say what area to spatially average over when the field varies across the width

of a person, what to do about a 30-minute averaging time when the field is steady and the

person is not, what instrument to use, at what height, or with what uncertainty budget.

IEEE Std C95.3-2021 is the general answer to that question and is deliberately not a

procedure. Its IEEE SA page gives board approval 25 March 2021 and publication 28 May 2021,

and the scope says plainly that detailed methodology is not described: best practice is

expressed through guidance and references to other documents. That is the right document

for a specialist and the wrong one to attach to a licence application.

The document that does give procedures is IEC 62232, fourth edition, published 29 April 2025

by IEC TC 106 and titled "Determination of RF field strength, power density and SAR in the

vicinity of base stations for the purpose of evaluating human exposure". It covers 110 MHz

to 300 GHz for intentional transmissions, it distinguishes product compliance boundaries

from installation compliance and in-situ measurement, and it handles time-varying

beam-steering including massive MIMO. Every piece of that is close to what a power beaming

site needs. None of it is scoped to a transmitter whose purpose is to deliver power, and a

rectenna field is not a base station.

The project that would close the gap has produced nothing public in three years

IEEE P63480 is the project. Its IEEE SA page, read on 27 September 2026, gives the title as

"Assessment of Human Exposure to Electromagnetic Fields from Radiative Wireless Power

Transfer Systems: Measurement and Computational Methods", for the frequency range 30 MHz to

300 GHz. Status: Active PAR. PAR approval date: 29 June 2023. Sponsor: the IEEE SA Board of

Governors through ICES, the International Committee on Electromagnetic Safety. Working group

chair: Andreas Christ. The scope covers incident field strength, incident power density,

specific absorption rate and absorbed power density, from the reactive near field out to the

far field.

The page shows no draft, no ballot state and no publication date. It has shown none on every

reading this project's daily scan has made since 30 August 2026.

One honest caveat before that is over-read. IEEE drafts are not public before ballot, so the

absence of a visible draft is not proof that nobody is writing one. What is public, and what

is checkable, is the clock.

The IEEE SA Standards Board New Standards Committee recommendations carrying SASB approval

date 29 June 2023 list P63480 under ICES among the new PARs, with the recommendation

"Approve new PAR until December 2027." The IEEE SA Standards Board Operations Manual,

clause 5.2, sets the rest: a project not completed by the four-year deadline authorised in

the PAR needs the Standards Committee to file an extension request with NesCom, which may be

granted for one or more years, and a project that reaches its deadline without one "shall be

subject to administrative withdrawal".

Fifteen months, from today, on the authorisation as originally granted. Two limits on that

sentence. The project page publishes no expiry date, and searches of published NesCom

papers did not surface an extension for P63480 in either direction. If an extension has been

granted since 2023, it is not visible on the pages checked here.

The same committee shipped the other half of this job last year

The gap is not a failure of the machinery, and the evidence is that the machinery already

delivered the adjacent standard. IEC/IEEE 63184:2025 was published on 25 February 2025 by

IEC TC 106, titled "Assessment methods of the human exposure to electric and magnetic fields

from wireless power transfer systems", covering models, instrumentation, measurement and

computational methods for the range 3 kHz to 30 MHz. It handles SAR, internal electric

fields and contact currents, and it is aimed at inductive systems.

That is the low-frequency, near-field half of exposure assessment for wireless power, it is

finished, and it carries both logos. So the joint IEC and IEEE route works, and the people

who know how to write these documents are in the room.

The half that is missing is precisely the half power beaming needs. The most likely reading

is not competence but priority. The market behind 63184 is electric vehicle and consumer

charging, shipping in the millions of units, with manufacturers who need a compliance test

today. The market behind 63480 is a small number of funded demonstrations. Standards follow

units, and there are no units yet.

What an operator is holding while that runs

Put rough numbers on the thing being measured. What follows is estimated, and it is

arithmetic on a hypothetical rather than anybody's published system.

Take a transmitting aperture 1 km across in geostationary orbit at 5.8 GHz. Before going

further: 5.8 GHz is not regulatorily available for space-to-Earth power transmission. It is

the band the engineering literature uses, it sits in an ISM allocation intended for

industrial, scientific and medical use, and using it in a study is not permission to radiate

from orbit.

At a 5.17 cm wavelength over 35,786 km, the first-null main lobe from a 1 km aperture is

roughly 2.44 λR/D, which is about 4.5 km across. Spread a radiated gigawatt across that, and

the average is around 60 W/m², with an on-axis peak perhaps twice that under a tapered

illumination. Both figures are estimates. Radiated is not delivered, and neither number is a

rating of any real machine.

Against a general public reference level of 10 W/m², the consequence is geometric. The

boundary of the publicly accessible area is a flux contour lying a kilometre or so outside

the nominal spot, and where exactly it lies depends on the aperture taper, the pointing

error and the atmosphere on the day. That contour is the fence. It is also a site's largest

land cost and its licence condition.

Now ask the questions the limit does not answer. Over what area is the average taken. What

counts as compliance for a person crossing the contour for two minutes rather than thirty.

Who measures it, with what instrument, traceable to what, and what uncertainty does the

regulator accept. Those are exactly the questions P63480 was chartered to answer. Until it

lands, every demonstration negotiates its own method with its own regulator, and every one

of those negotiations sets a precedent that no committee voted on.

The ITU side does not fill the gap either. The in-force Recommendation ITU-R SM.2151-0

(09/2022) is titled "Guidance on frequency ranges for operation of wireless power

transmission via radio frequency beam for mobile/portable devices and sensor networks",

which is its scope as well as its title. WRC-31 preliminary agenda item 2.2, under

Resolution 910 (WRC-23) and led by Working Party 1A, reads "to consider the possible

[frequency bands] for [non-beam and beam] wireless power transmission to avoid harmful

interference to the radiocommunication services", brackets in the original. That is

interference between services, not human exposure, and it is not yet agreed text.

What would change my mind

A public draft or a ballot state appearing on the P63480 project page would change the

strongest sentence here immediately, and I would say so.

A NesCom record extending the PAR past December 2027 would change the framing even without a

draft, because it would show a committee that intends to finish rather than one drifting

into administrative withdrawal. That record is the single piece of evidence this article

most wants and does not have.

The IEC side is unchecked and could contradict me. The IEC TC 106 project dashboard returned

HTTP 403 to this run, so the IEC-side stage for 63480 was not read. If it shows a committee

draft in circulation, then "no draft in three years" is wrong as written and should be

retracted rather than softened.

A regulator publishing guidance that extends IEC 62232's base-station procedures to power

beaming would close the gap in practice without any new standard. That would be the quiet

outcome, and it is plausible, because it is what regulators usually do.

What would not change my mind is another funded demonstration, another award, or another

company announcing a megawatt of anything. Money is not a method, and a compliance

demonstration that cannot be repeated by a second party with published procedures is a

private arrangement wearing a standard's clothes.

Sources