Space Solar Station This seems far more feasible than the space hotels, but massive in costs. I wonder how long that thing would have to be in space (and functioning) to pay itself off. I'm very excited about this technology if only because it forces us to think outside of Earth and gets us one step closer to the Space Age we've all dreamed about (in one form or another). Also, all these "green" technologies are going to be used in other ways anyway, so it good to get the ball rolling on that as well. It's a win-win, whether or not you believe in global warming.

I'm definitely for this. My town in Simcity 2000 had a microwave power plant working great for years.



...until that incident that caused half of the city to burn up in flames.

It's interesting but there is already more than enough solar energy hitting the Earth to power all of humanity 1 million times over. With current solar efficiencies (15%) it's estimated a solar plant covering about 1000 square miles could supply all of the power for the US. It's not even that expensive compared to conventional energy (if u include the cost of procuring the supply of oil/coal into the equation to make things more fair).

Were talking about 100's of billions to make all those solar plants but our priorities are elsewhere right now (bailing out corrupt/broken industries, billion dollar bombers, etc..). It's a question of imagination really and the people in power can't imagine a world without coal/oil.

-ddn

Quote: Original post by ddn3
Were talking about 100's of billions to make all those solar plants ...

It's a question of imagination really and the people in power can't imagine a world without coal/oil.

That's the problem exactly. No private investor is going to build such thing. Let the state build it with money from taxes and then give it away for free to some republican monopoly.

That should do the trick.

EDIT: BTW that solar plant from the article looks more like a weapon than like an energy plant. I mean, beaming down laser beams? What if they miss?

[Edited by - owl on November 8, 2009 6:28:15 PM]

As long as this geosynchronous orbit has no Line of Site to my house for the lasers, I'm good with it ^.^ It's REALLY a cool idea, it's just a matter of will they be able to keep the project going, or will it be cut with the economy the way it is. Hopefully it doesn't get scrapped, this really would be a nice step into the future!

Quote:
Were talking about 100's of billions to make all those solar plants but our priorities are elsewhere right now (bailing out corrupt/broken industries, billion dollar bombers, etc..). It's a question of imagination really and the people in power can't imagine a world without coal/oil.

Something to consider is that a huge multi-$100 billion project like this would create quite a few new jobs. In today's economy, is that such a bad thing?

I think the problem with land based systems is the wear and the fact that japan might not have the land to build the installations.

The US has no real excuse for not investing in solar or wind stuff on the large scale :\ I've always found it odd that we don't have like thousands square miles of solar panels (either photoelectric or Stirling) since there's so much open space.

Don't get me wrong, the world is moving solar big time, China is building the worlds largest solar plant (2000MW) of power in the Gobi desert (compared to Americas largest plant of 20MW). It's true that it produces as much as a conventional coal/nuclear plant but it's just the beginning. Once they get indigenous thin film solar technology going (from Solar One) they will start to crank them out and the whole world will benefit from cheap solar cells, through their investment of scale.

The thing about the Chinese is that they can invest in strategic technologies with single minded focus, where as the US has to balance competing interest (of which most are anti-competitive and anti-new technology).

America has the lead in solar technology for the intern but they are just wasting it with unfocused uninspired policies. We can have solar powered short range vehicles, mass produce 3rd generation solar technologies (Sterling engines with 25% collection efficiencies), long term energy storage technologies and supercharge our industries with basically free energy, only if we had the imagination.

-ddn

Space solar collection systems are pretty retarded. Think of the cost of construction. I don't have exact figures, but solar panels are pretty heavy... how many rockets are needed to launch it into space? Also, the surface area of solar panels required for any useful amount of energy are also going to be hitting space debris (unless it's orbited wwaaayyyy out) and meteoroids etc.

It's much more feasible and cheaper to have land-based solar panels.

Quote: Original post by curtmax_0
It's much more feasible and cheaper to have land-based solar panels.

Japan is an extremely small place, largely covered in forested mountains which they'll never get approval to build on.
They've even gone as far as building artificial islands for land-heavy projects like airports, so good luck finding some spare acres to put solar arrays on!

For countries like America or Australia with lots of "unusable" desert land, a space solar project would be insane. But the Japanese don't have a desert.