And a “few” as well. :rolleyes:
Most digital cell phones operate on 6/10 of a watt. There are a lot of people who are scared to death of getting brain cancer from being exposed to it for a few seconds a day. Personally I think that while beaming power down to earth is a great and probably safe way of getting renewable non polluting power, people are going to freak. If we are going to have a set up like this it’s going to have to be out in the middle of the dessert some place.
My question is how much juice are we talking about getting from this? Would it even be worth the cost of manning the station let alone sending the equipment up there in the first place?
Right now, no. The cost to put something into space is too high.
I don’t think the space part would be manned. (You might want a few people in the ground station)
brian
That’s what I meant, manning the ground station.
I’m still wondering how much power we could realistically expect to see. Would it be an amount that would let us pipe it through out the country? If so then having a large station in the middle of a dead patch of desert could become the next Niagra falls.
But if we’re going to get the kind of power I think we’re going to see, it will never work. Not enough power to make it profitable let alone to cover the safety concerns.
Depends on how large an area of solar panels you’re willing to build. On average, the space around Earth receives about 1370 W/m[sup]2[/sup]. If you build a solar array 100m x 100m = 10,000 m[sup]2[/sup] x 1370 W/m[sup]2[/sup] = 13.7MW. From here, solar cell efficiency is about 18%, so 13.7MW x 18% = 2.466MW. Then there are the losses from power transmission. According to this site, the highest attained was 84% efficiency, so, 2.466MW x 84% = 2.07144MW of power extracted at the Earth station for a 100m x 100m solar array.
You’re all forgetting something important about trying to build this. There is huge resistance to doing so because any space-based microwave beaming energy generator could just as easily be made/used as a ‘deathray’ type weapon.
Not that this would be a bad thing as long as it was the US that had it, but any attempt to build a so-called satellite power generator would be viewed as a cover-up for a weapons program by the rest of the world.
How dare you interject practicality into this purely theoretical discussion, Hail Ants! Now, be gone! 