Remember how much derision there was when some Republican candidate — I forget where — speculated that such a beam could’ve caused the forest fires? And how they insisted there was no such beam?
Imagine if your passenger aircraft were to fly through an electricity beam. Sounds very cool and may even be promising.
Called the ozone hole grower?.
The only problem with beaming energy from space is that every repair to the system will cost millions as they have to rocket into space each time.
Power beam? As in, what Tesla was trying to develop?
Don’t accidentally fly into the beam zone/cone.
Prohibitively expensive.
Best comment on that site:
“NASA/Glaser published a Detailed Report on Geo-Synchronous Sattelite based Microwave Power Transmission over 50 years back.. yes probably when these authors were kids or not even born… but is being promoted as “SOMETHING NEW & SPECTACULAR”..
Who are they kidding..???”
This is old, old news and these guys are smokin’ wacky terbacky if they think it’s ever gonna be adopted for routine power production.
FAR too many terrestrial options.
That shouldn’t warm the atmosphere too much.
I don’t envy the job of being the continuous lightning bolt catcher. That’s what beaming wireless electricity from the atmosphere is. One heck of a bank of capacitors to catch and hold it too!
And you thought windmills were bad for birds.
Just wait till a flock of migrating whooping cranes flies through the 1.21 GigaWatt beam and incinerates themselves on the way to Aransas Pass.
How many cents per kw-hr?
First it was the huge windmill Bird Cuisinarts.
Now it's going to be the Emeril Bird Air Fryer.
Leave the fn birds alone.
Oh yeah and I'm sure the beam would never slice through a plane or be aimed to roast a small town.
Could never happen.
No thanks.
Jeez.
I saw a preliminary plan for this in 1982 when I was building solar panels for satellites. Lets not pretend for one minute that this is even remotely new or possible. You know the limiting factor that disqualified it from being able to be built in 1982? The weight of the power bus bars that would be necessary to make them strong enough to carry enough current to make it worthwhile. The magnetic flux of the flow of electricity would bend and warp them so much they would weaken and break very quickly.
Microwave transmission is nothing new, but it is highly inefficient. And if you concentrate the “beam” too much, you’d end up cooking whatever gets in between point A and point B. You think windmills kill a lot of birds, just wait.
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.
It’s Nikola Tesla.
— Green is red. This shows the whole climate commies as empty prophets of doom for doom’s sake.
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.