Worldcons often have panels about alternative energy sources, and one of the ideas that often gets brought up is putting mirrors in space to concentrate solar energy and beam it down to earth. Well, Nature reports on a trial.
The experiment in question doesn’t actually use a satellite, but it does send the microwave ray through 100km of atmosphere – the sort of journey that would be required for a space-based power source. The experimenters are enthusiastic. I am less so. Quite apart from the wisdom of creating what really would be orbital death rays, I note that the efficiency of the trial was something in the region of 0.000001%, and the estimated cost of putting a small trial plant in orbit is around 100 times the cost of building a large new nuclear power station. Obviously this can be improved with sufficient investment of time and money, but I think this is still a little way off.
I’ve always wondered why space based transmission keeps coming back.
Between the “death ray” aspect and the dissipation issues, it would never ever be a viable energy supply.
You note the 100x a nuclear plant cost.
How many solar and wind farms would that money buy?
How many houses with roofs that are covered in solar cells?
How many sky scrapers with wind turbines sitting in the high winds that shoot up the sides of the building?
Well, there are two reasons. Firstly orbital death rays are sexy, so people get obsessed with them. But also only really, stupidly big projects can get government backing. The big problem for renewable energy has been death by a thousand planning applications. The US is doing quite well, because it has lots of empty space where it can put the plants (especially in Texas), but the UK’s renewables industry finds it very difficult to get permission to build anything. As a result the UK government is looking again at nukes, because that’s a big enough project for them to justify coming in and steamrollering local objections.
Of course the proposed trial orbital system is a fraction of the size of modern wind farms and solar installations. It is just very, very expensive.
I suspect some cunning peace-loving person will be able to devise a transmission method which removed the Death Ray possibility (but you can bet that if these things do get built, it will be with military funding and an eye to this particular function, sadly).
I do know that having orbiting power generation stations would mean there’s something up there to visit. If we’re going to establish off-world colonies, we need to give people something to go visit.
The usual safety excuse is that the systems would have computer controls to make sure that they never malfunctioned and could not be misdirected.
Yes, I hear you laughing.
But as for a 100km-long stream of energy, it is kind of hard not to make it deadly without taking all of the energy away.