Posted on 11/07/2022 8:59:59 AM PST by Eleutheria5
Technology capable of collecting solar power in space and beaming it to Earth to provide a global supply of clean and affordable energy was once considered science fiction. Now it is moving closer to reality. Through the Space-based Solar Power Project (SSPP), a team of California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers is working to deploy a constellation of modular spacecraft that collect sunlight, transform it into electricity, then wirelessly transmit that electricity wherever it is needed. They could even send it to places that currently have no access to reliable power.
“This is an extraordinary and unprecedented project,” says Harry Atwater, an SSPP researcher and Otis Booth Leadership Chair of Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science. “It exemplifies the boldness and ambition needed to address one of the most significant challenges of our time, providing clean and affordable energy...
(Excerpt) Read more at scitechdaily.com ...
It slices! it dices! it makes mounds of coleslaw!................
Once deployed, the structure expands, and the tiles work in concert and in synchronization to generate energy, convert it, and transfer it exactly where you need it and nowhere else.
How much energy is used to build the satellites and put them up in space, and whether or not they can collect more than that over their estimated lifetimes should be the real considerations.
The only victims may be the birds and/or bats that wander through the beam.
Pre cooked.
It’s Nikola Tesla.
— Green is red. This shows the whole climate commies as empty prophets of doom for doom’s sake.
Don’t crash going to the supermarket either.
A truly unique comedian!......................
that’s pretty much what this sounds like - microwaves.
but but but now we have carbon nanotubes and metamaterials and look what we’ve done with battery technology... oh no wait, don’t look at that...
Airliners are hit by cloud to cloud lightning quite a bit. The components on board in the cockpit are shielded and made to survive lightning strikes. In the manufacturing process they are qualified to be used by being tested on what is a "lightning strike table". It's a big copper table with a big copper canopy. The top canopy is charged up to incredible energy and then it jumps to the lower table in an artificially produced lighting strike. Then they verify the equipment isn't damaged and still works. Pretty cool to watch.
This is another poor attempt from the "something for nothing" crowd, to pretend that subsidizing it with your tax dollars means its free.
Aside from a career in cutting edge satellite technology, I was fortunate enough to have had 3 graduate level classes from Dr. Roger Burke, who was the father of solar power at JPL/CalTech, both land and space based.
The costs are high, the development and deployment are long term and the breakeven timetable is more than 30 years out, if we start today.
1. We try this.
2. We like it... commit the nation to a 30-year program for a full constellation of satellites that will render all current electrical production obsolete.
3. Europe does likewise.
4. The ChiComs snicker and immediately set up a bunch of ICBM’s to take out all of the power satellites once we’re 100% committed, throw the West into the dark ages, and take over the world.
Microwave energy transmission is nothing new. It is an old line of research that never panned out. The problem being focusing the power transfer beam. That is going to use more power than is generated. If you look at EM wave equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_wave_equation.... you can see that once it hits atmosphere the beam deteriorates to the point where in order to collect enough power to make this endeavor worth while they are going to have to transmit gigawatts of power to a location to make megawatts of power earth side and then you have to worry about radiation leakage, that can cause cancer, fires, kill live stock and birds, and all manner of very bad side effects.... I would be interested to see how they intend to mitigate these problems.
This concept was being studied in the 1970s. My father worked at Boeing back then and described a similar project. I believe it was a feasibility study. The idea was to convert solar energy to microwaves, then beam the energy down to a “rect-antenna”.
“Electricity Beam” = Microwaves
Adding energy to the existing ecosystem system is a dubious enterprise with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Also, very bad for anything living, electronic or mechanical thing that passes through the energy beam.
Reminds me of the movie Real Genius with Val Kilmer. Best not stash too much popcorn.
And if it’s relayed to a close orbiting satellite, and from there beamed to a high altitude receptor and from there distributed?
Some form of orbiting solar panels beaming down energy to Earth via microwaves has been proposed time and time again since the early 1980s at least.
What makes this proposal any different than all the previous ones? Cost of launching enough mass in the form of solar cells and microwave transmitters has always been sticking point #1.
Microwaving passing birds has been #2.
The inefficiency of the energy-tp-microwave-to-energy transport chain has been #3.
Yup. And bore a hole from space to the ground through the atmosphere with massive radiation. So much for the ozone layer. A hole in the upper levels of the atmosphere is probably not a good thing.
Remember that recent star trek movie where the Romulans had a drill mining device? Probably something like that. :)
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