On the phone side, certified Qi2 25W products have only just started reaching shelves, and China's own UFCS standard only made its debut in high-speed rail business-class cars late last month. Meanwhile, the same standards body, the WPC, has another line already running at nearly a hundred times that figure. It's called Ki, and its goal is to remove the power cord from kitchen appliances entirely.
Ki officially stands for Cordless Kitchen, pronounced "kee," and it targets appliances like kettles, blenders, and rice cookers, with up to 2.2 kW delivered wirelessly to a single appliance and support for both 110 V and 220 V markets. Its most fundamental difference from Qi is the absence of a battery: the transferred power feeds the load directly, so heating elements, motors, and power electronics draw live current with no battery buffer in between. It is still called wireless power, but on the kitchen end the engineering is almost a separate discipline.
Using it is straightforward. Place an appliance on a compatible cooktop or countertop and a transmitter beneath the surface sends power to a receiver built into the appliance. Technically it builds on induction cooking and layers NFC communication on top: the appliance identifies itself and requests the power it needs, with no Bluetooth pairing and no battery. The safety logic is built around the same idea—the transmitter only powers certified Ki appliances, anything else left on the surface stays off, and power is cut the instant an appliance is lifted or tilted. That contact-only-when-recognized mechanism is precisely what makes power above two kilowatts viable on a kitchen counter.
The timeline is moving faster than many assume. The Ki specification was released in 2025, certification testing was in place that same summer, and v1.0 covers dual-function induction cooktops plus standalone countertop transmitters. At the WPC booth at CES 2026, members including Philips, E.G.O., Jabil, Midea, and WMF showed working kettles, blenders, toasters, food processors, and a waffle maker, while air fryers and juicers remained non-functional prototypes. The question heard most often at the booth was where these appliances could be bought—and the answer then was nowhere yet. According to the WPC itself, the first Ki products could reach some markets as early as the end of 2026.
There are three configurations in play. The first extends an ordinary induction cooktop into a dual-function zone: the same area heats a pan or powers a Ki appliance. The second buries the transmitter entirely under a countertop, kitchen island, or dining table, working through non-metallic surfaces of standard thickness. Kitchen design firms favor this one because it avoids drilling holes in a prized countertop and needs no extra wiring. The third, known as the Island specification, combines appliance power with invisible induction cooking beneath heat-resistant materials such as porcelain or Dekton. The WPC's roadmap runs from the dual-function cooktop and certification program starting in 2025, to concealed power and the Island spec this year, and on to smart cookware in 2027.
For ordinary consumers the meaningful milestone is 2028, when German cabinetry maker Nobilia plans to begin integrating Ki into its kitchen products. Rick Dumont, who handles business development for the WPC's promotion team, said the cooperation began in the middle of last year and that Nobilia wants to launch during 2028. Once a cabinetmaker commits, appliance brands become willing to develop compatible models—the order of that chain is the reverse of what most people assume. As for smart Ki cookware with guided cooking, Dumont puts that around 2030, roughly two years after the first full-kitchen integrations.
The kitchen setting imposes genuinely hard demands on power electronics. Countertop thickness directly sets the distance between coils, and 15 to 40 mm are all realistic conditions; receiver coils range from 8 to 18 cm in diameter, and the coupling factor spans a wide band of roughly 0.15 to 0.75. That means voltage, current, and resonance points all drift while output power must stay constant. Ki's answer is a load-resonant topology with resonance on both the transmitter and receiver sides, keeping zero-voltage switching across a broad operating range while holding efficiency, temperature rise, and electromagnetic margins within acceptable limits. Control is layered three ways: duty cycle sets power precisely, frequency control compensates for shifting resonance, and burst mode handles low load or poor coupling. In Ki, EMC and safety are design prerequisites, not a rework step.
The practical obstacles are equally clear. Ki cannot escape the chicken-and-egg problem common to any new standard: kitchen makers need appliances available, appliance makers need installed kitchens to sell into, and consumers need enough compatible products to see the point. Price is another unavoidable factor, since Ki appliances cost more than corded versions because of the added receiver coil and supporting electronics. For anyone building wireless power products, the real weight of this line is that a receiver coil plus power control plus certification becomes a new block on the bill of materials for kitchen appliances, while countertops, cabinetry, islands, and dining tables turn into a new class of transmitter surface—wireless power at home extends from a single desk to an entire kitchen. Whether that opportunity can be captured comes down to three things rather than a headline wattage: structural margin under given countertop thickness and cutout constraints, kilowatt-class thermal and electromagnetic design capability, and access to a verifiable Ki certification. The 25W race on phones is a consumer business; the 2.2 kW race in the kitchen is about power electronics and home-improvement channels.
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