Solar Power Satellites: Can We Get Energy From Space?

WSJ:

PowerSat Corp., based in Everett, Wash., said Tuesday it had filed for a patent meant to solve two of the trickier problems bedeviling those engineers who want to tap into the solar system's abundant supply of free energy. That includes figuring out a way to tie lots of smaller solar satellites together to act like one big one, and figuring out a cheaper way to get them into space in the first place.

Read the whole story: WSJ

Comments

[SonofLiberty1]

I wonder....

If Cell phones are dangerous because of the microwave radiation, why wouldn't such a satellite receiving station be just as or more dangerous?

[KillTheMessenger]

Far more dangerous. You couldn't have anyone come even close to the center of the beam. The whole scheme only makes sense if you have a power density far greater than that of the solar radiation on earth itself, i.e. >>1kW/m^2. That begins to resemble the conditions found inside your microwave oven. Of course, one would chose a frequency other than the one which water absorbs the strongest (as is used in Microwave ovens), but even so, the beam would definitely be a real hazard.

[ImmanuelGoldstein]

I used to be an SPS fan until I looked at the area of systemic energy return.
Put simply space based solar cells are only about 8x as effecient in producing energy that ground based ones.
So in terms of energy and other costs it would be a lot cheaper just to make 8x as many photocells and put them on the ground.
And frankly this wonderful solar powered launch system looks like a bunch of hooey.....­..unless they have a space elevator to plug it into......

[KillTheMessenger]

Yep. It does not survive any back of the envelope test. But then it does not have to. These things are sold to investors who are about as dumb as they come.

[Semaj51]

Oh, what stuff dreams are made of -- and what leaps one would go to con....

[research]

Another Dumb idea: Now you have to loss more energy in converting from sun to electrical to uwave, to electrical, then distribute it from a central site.

Rooftop solar is already 3 cents per KWH over 30 years, and it reduces grid load. See my profile.

[AngieMom57]

Not worth the time, hello, anyone of these people read about all the space trash up there possibly destroying anything in its way?

First clean up the trash, not likely because there is no money in cleaning only in polluting.

[KillTheMessenger]

Patents have a useful life of 20 years. Since none of this will be commercially applied anytime soon, any such patent is worthless except as a tool to scam clueless investors.

And, yes, most of the article is gibberish which was written by someone who doesn't have a clue but at least had the nose to smell a skunk.

:-)

[SiriusMrE]

Because the earth is a small charged body moving in an ionized plasma, our atmosphere is actually what is known to electrical engineers as a double layer (DL), which separates positive charges on one side from negative charges on the other. This creates a tremendous voltage gradient across the boundary of the DL. Because the Earth's atmosphere could be thought of as a leaky capacitor, if we could somehow get some sort of power converter/­transmitte­r to the ionosphere, we could get abundant power.

As an aside, it is because of this feature of the Earth's atmosphere that the so-called "space elevator" idea, if completed, would have surprising and possibly devastating consequences.

"One electrical device which serves as a model for cosmic plasma activity is the capacitor. A capacitor is a device for accumulating and storing electric charge. It is made of two conductors separated by an insulating medium. When charge is placed on one conductor it attracts charge of the opposite polarity on the other conductor. As a result, an electric field is set up between the conductors, a reservoir of electrical energy."
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/arch/040927earth-capacitor.htm

[quiviran]

Why bother. Abundant energy falls on the surface. All that's required is an aggressive, distributed effort to harvest it.

[SwingingFromCenter]

Of course you can get energy from space. Just like you can get energy down here.

This story is about as relevant as Nokia's new phone that can recharge by picking up radio waves around it. It's nothing new.

A century again, Tesla lit up 100 100 watt light bulbs, wirelessly, from 50 miles away. To this day, nobody has figured out how he did it. But fact remains this isn't anything new because he did it before all of us were even born using spare parts in a shed.

[KillTheMessenger]

Tesla probably put a couple of MW into his transceiver and maybe got a couple 100W out (it does not take 100W to light up a 100W light bulb, not to mention that in Tesla's time there probably was no such thing as a standard 100W light bulb). With the proper resonant coupling one can achieve that kind of "efficiency" over that distance probably quite easily... all you have to do is to make your antennas large enough. You may have seen fluorescent lights glowing next to a conventional AM transmitter station? That's near-field coupling without any antenna. Add an antenna to that and the poor fluorescent light is going light up miles from the transmitter, which is a fraction of Tesla's apparatus.

And today we can do way better than that with a modern microwave link for a couple hundred grand worth of hardware.

[KillTheMessenger]

Ooops... of course Tesla didn't have a "transceiver" but only a "transmitt­er"... sorry about that. I think I need a coffee.