A 26-Year-Old Inventor Is Trying To Put Mirrors In Space To Generate Solar Power At Night (vice.com) 158
Ben Nowack, a 26-year old inventor and CEO of Tons of Mirrors, is trying to use satellite-mounted reflective surfaces to redirect sunlight to earthbound solar panels at night. In an interview with Motherboard, Nowack explains what inspired this idea and how he can turn his concept into reality. Here's an excerpt from the report: What was the initial idea?
I had an interesting way to solve the real issue with solar power. It's this unstoppable force. Everybody's installing so many solar panels everywhere. It's really a great candidate to power humanity. But sunlight turns off, it's called nighttime. If you solve that fundamental problem, you fix solar everywhere.
Where did the idea come from? I was watching a YouTube video called The Problem with Solar Energy in Africa. It was basically saying that you need three times as many solar panels in Germany as you do in the Sahara Desert and you can't get the power from the Sahara to Germany in an easy way. I thought, what if you could beam the sunlight and then reflect it with mirrors, and put that light into laser beam vacuum tubes that zigzag around the curvature of the Earth. It could be this beam that comes in just like power companies, this tube full of infinite light. That was the initial idea. But the approach was completely economically unworkable. I was like, this is not going to compete with solar in 10 years. I should just completely give up and do something else. Then I was on a run two days later and thought what if I put that thing that turns sunlight into a beam in orbit then you don't have to build a vacuum tube anymore. And it's so much more valuable because you can shine sunlight on solar farms that already exist. Then I developed several more technologies which I know for a fact no one else is working on. That made the model even more economical.
Are these just like regular household mirrors, but fixed to a satellite? If you did that, the light would go to too many places. The sun is a certain size. It's not a point, it has a distance across. The light from one side of the sun would bounce off your mirror, and the light from the other side would also bounces off your mirror. If you used a perfectly flat mirror, every single microscopic piece would have this angle of diverging light coming from it. By the time the reflection hit Earth, you'd get a 3.6 kilometer diameter spot, which is gigantic. There are only 10 solar farms that big. So I did the math, and figured out that if I could hit a 500-meter spot instead of a 3,600-meter spot, then I'd be able to hit 44 times more solar sites per orbit.
So what's the solve?
The only way to do this is with a collimator. If you picture a candle, the light is going to spring out in every possible direction. If you put a mirror on one side of the candle, now it's spreading out more one way than everywhere else. If you put the mirrors all around the candle, you'll get more lighting on a single very specific point. It's about how parallel the light rays are. A laser is very collimated light.
Where did the idea come from? I was watching a YouTube video called The Problem with Solar Energy in Africa. It was basically saying that you need three times as many solar panels in Germany as you do in the Sahara Desert and you can't get the power from the Sahara to Germany in an easy way. I thought, what if you could beam the sunlight and then reflect it with mirrors, and put that light into laser beam vacuum tubes that zigzag around the curvature of the Earth. It could be this beam that comes in just like power companies, this tube full of infinite light. That was the initial idea. But the approach was completely economically unworkable. I was like, this is not going to compete with solar in 10 years. I should just completely give up and do something else. Then I was on a run two days later and thought what if I put that thing that turns sunlight into a beam in orbit then you don't have to build a vacuum tube anymore. And it's so much more valuable because you can shine sunlight on solar farms that already exist. Then I developed several more technologies which I know for a fact no one else is working on. That made the model even more economical.
Are these just like regular household mirrors, but fixed to a satellite? If you did that, the light would go to too many places. The sun is a certain size. It's not a point, it has a distance across. The light from one side of the sun would bounce off your mirror, and the light from the other side would also bounces off your mirror. If you used a perfectly flat mirror, every single microscopic piece would have this angle of diverging light coming from it. By the time the reflection hit Earth, you'd get a 3.6 kilometer diameter spot, which is gigantic. There are only 10 solar farms that big. So I did the math, and figured out that if I could hit a 500-meter spot instead of a 3,600-meter spot, then I'd be able to hit 44 times more solar sites per orbit.
You lost me with these tiles... The James Webb Space Telescope takes light from a very small star very far away and blows that image up. I'm doing precisely the opposite. It's the same exact mirrors, you just turn it the other way. If you did that the James Webb way and you want to make something as bright as the sun on the ground with a collimator, the big lens has to be a kilometer-and-a-half across, which is gigantic. If you want a mirror that's a kilometer-and-a-half across, and have it be the right shape -- which is not flat, it's a parabola -- every part has to be extremely accurate and it's gonna be really big and floppy. And if you ever want rotate it, you're in trouble. Instead of making a kilometer-and-a-half single parabola, I am making a kilometer-and-a-half of several million parabolas. These tiny little parabolas are like dimples on a plastic Diet Coke cup. At that size, they hold the shape of the parabola so well. It completely solves the problem and makes it super-linearly scalable.
What needs to happen to get from concept to application here? It's really just money. I'm trying to raise $5 million to put one of these tiles on the International Space Station right now. I want it up there to make sure this spot size is what we expect it to be and that all the math checks out. The next step is building a bigger satellite that's a proof-of-profitability that serves legitimate customers on the ground. The next step after that is raise even more money and put a bunch more satellites up there and have a real constellation. Once we're at that stage, we'll know how cheap the manufacturing gets, how expensive the set-up is, fixed costs, operating costs. Then we'll have a better idea of how this stacks up against fossil fuel plants. Making this cheaper than everything else, that's the challenge.
You can read the full interview here.
This is a bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
This 26 year old should supplement his physics with engineering 1102.
Re:This is a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't worry, it'll suck in a bunch of gullible rubes who don't understand engineering in the slightest.
Like marketing a dehumidifier to the "water from the air" crowd...
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> Don't worry, it'll suck in a bunch of gullible rubes who don't understand engineering in the slightest.
Like every new fusion company.
Re: This is a bad idea (Score:2)
I don't think the extra heat is a problem. He is talking about a 500 metre wide circle of sunlight. That's not a lot of extra heat - it's next to nothing. Even if he had 500 if these things you are still talking 100sq KMs (a square 10km on a side), versus the approximate surface area of the earth that faces the sun during full daylight (say 40 million sq KMs as a rough estimate). As for daylight, if the collimator does its job right the light should be more or less invisible not far outside the circle of li
Re: This is a bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think the extra heat is a problem.
No, the problem is that he's a nutcase.
I was watching a YouTube video called The Problem with Solar Energy in Africa. It was basically saying that you need three times as many solar panels in Germany as you do in the Sahara Desert and you can't get the power from the Sahara to Germany in an easy way. I thought, what if you could beam the sunlight and then reflect it with mirrors, and put that light into laser beam vacuum tubes that zigzag around the curvature of the Earth. It could be this beam that comes in just like power companies, this tube full of infinite light. That was the initial idea. But the approach was completely economically unworkable. I was like, this is not going to compete with solar in 10 years. I should just completely give up and do something else. Then I was on a run two days later and thought what if I put that thing that turns sunlight into a beam in orbit then you don't have to build a vacuum tube anymore. And it's so much more valuable because you can shine sunlight on solar farms that already exist.
Yeah, all that that sounds way easier than building a cable from Africa to Germany.
(facepalm)
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So I'm a nuclear power fan, and I think all solar is dumb as hell, but
Yes, it actually does, if you think about it. Putting a couple small objects in orbit, aligning them, and keeping ~90% of them going isn't that hard
Keeping a giant ultra-valuable cable going despite weather, criminals, animals, natural disasters, competitors, foreign governments, etc? That's actually very hard
They're not repeatedly sending submarines to t
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Putting a couple small objects in orbit, aligning them, and keeping ~90% of them going isn't that hard
well, plenty more than a couple, and the sum of them will need to be pretty, pretty large to be of any use, a surface you will have to replicate on earth or else you're dealing with a high energy concentrated beam which is a more than half a century old idea that nobody bothers with for a reason: it is a huge hazard in itself.
also, space is pretty crowded nowadays and considering the direction where our "world powers" are guiding us to lately, sabotage in space isn't such a outlandish risk at all ... and it
Re: This is a bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
and I think all solar is dumb as hell
You think electricity generated from a near infinite source (sun) is dumb as hell? Even though it is currently pumping out 10+GW of power in California alone?
Putting a couple small objects in orbit, aligning them, and keeping ~90% of them going isn't that hard
I can tell you know little about what it takes to do any of this. Just for starters, it takes about $10k to put one pound of anything into orbit. So you can buy a Tesla Powerwall for nighttime backup for just the cost of putting a 1lb mirror into orbit. The Tesla Powerwall stores about 13kwh, which could easily power a single home overnight. Your 1lb mirror would be lucky to be one square foot, which would (being very generous) give you 0.1kwh of power overnight.
Keeping a giant ultra-valuable cable going despite weather, criminals, animals, natural disasters, competitors, foreign governments, etc? That's actually very hard
OK, go look around the world and see how many of these impossible cables we have running reliably for decades on end. Now go look around space and see how many orbiting mirrors we have keeping position for decades on end. Then get back to me with the number of each of these...
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A cable thousands of miles long is going to have enormous resistive losses unless it's superconducting - which is being considered, but maintaining cryogenic temperatures 24/7 through countless miles of some of the hottest places on Earth has its own challenges.
Not to mention it's easy for anyone in dozens of countries to sever your energy supply anywhere along the cable. But hey, you're going through North Africa and possibly the Middle East (unless you want to deal with a high-power undersea cable), two
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stonycypher asserted:
Yes, it actually does, if you think about it. Putting a couple small objects in orbit, aligning them, and keeping ~90% of them going isn't that hard
The Dunning-Kruger is strong in this one.
He and Immerman ignorantly assert:
stonycypher: Keeping a giant ultra-valuable cable going despite weather, criminals, animals, natural disasters, competitors, foreign governments, etc? That's actually very hard
Immerman:A cable thousands of miles long is going to have enormous resistive losses unless it's superconducting .. Not to mention it's easy for anyone in dozens of countries to sever your energy supply anywhere along the cable.
Power cables from Africa to Europe already exist [pv-magazine.com] and more are underway [balkangree...gynews.com]. Yeah, its tough to run a pipeline or power cable across any third ountry since they are all constantly severing those cables (Dozens? Have you ever seen what we call a map? A cable from Algeria bringing power to Germany runs through two - Spain and France.)
No long distance power cables in common use do not have enormous resistive losses an
Re: This is a bad idea (Score:2)
Power cables from Africa to Europe already exist and more are underway.
I'm reading that link as more hope and planning than actual cables with an operational history. Same for the green energy projects investors are planning for Africa. It all looks good on paper until Boko Haram objects to its potential subjects being invited into the first world economy and goes to work on the cables with an axe.
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I'm reading that link as more hope and planning than actual cables with an operational history.
There are two operational 400kV cables between Morocco and Spain, completed in 1997 and 2006. They can each transmit 700 MW. A third is under construction.
until Boko Haram objects
Boko Haram is in Nigeria, not Morocco. The two countries are separated by 4000 km and the world's largest desert.
Re: This is a bad idea (Score:2)
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A cable thousands of miles long is going to have enormous resistive losses
The rule of thumb for HVDC is 3.5% loss per thousand kilometers.
(unless you want to deal with a high-power undersea cable)
Undersea power cables between Africa and Europe already exist.
the political instability has been one of the major stumbling blocks
The African country closest to Europe is Morocco. Morocco is not politically unstable.
Morocco has enough desert to meet 100% of Europe's energy needs.
Another advantage is that Morocco is further to the west, so can provide power to most of Europe in the late afternoon when demand peaks.
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A cable thousands of miles long is going to have enormous resistive losses unless it's superconducting
Nope. I take it you have never heard of HVDC. Here are a few samples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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> As for daylight, if the collimator does its job right the light should be more or less invisible not far outside the circle of light
Are you familiar with the sky being blue?
Are you familiar with that that is?
Now, how will this not be lit up outside the circle?
Etendue is against you [Re: This is a bad idea] (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think the extra heat is a problem. He is talking about a 500 metre wide circle of sunlight.
Unfortunately, he is wrong about that. He thinks a "collimator" can solve the problem of the divergence angle of sunlight, but that's not how collimators work. He was right the first time, from low orbit you get a minimum spot about 3 to 5 km in diameter.
The divergence angle of sunlight is a basic problem and cannot be solved by clever optics. (Google "conservation of etendue").
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Take a look at the Wikipedia article on etendue, specifically the maximum concentration section:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Refractive or reflective optics, as well as collimators can make a spot size that is inversely proportional to their aperture. If you get a 5 km spot from a flat mirror, you can get a smaller spot using lenses, curved mirrors, or collimators.
The collimator solution is proably undesireable because the way it decreases spot size is by throwing away light.
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Take a look at the Wikipedia article on etendue, specifically the maximum concentration section:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Refractive or reflective optics, as well as collimators can make a spot size that is inversely proportional to their aperture. If you get a 5 km spot from a flat mirror, you can get a smaller spot using lenses, curved mirrors, or collimators.
Yes, but conservation of etendue says that to do that you need to move the optical system closer to the Earth. (I suppose I should have clarified in my post that the spot size can't be decreased unless the mirror isn't in orbit, but I assumed that was obvious.)
I'm not sure what it is you're interpreting out of the Wikipedia article, which doesn't really talk about spot size for transmitting light over a distance d. That section you link is talking about concentrators (and assumes you can change the focal le
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He claims to have solved that problem. He talked to physicists who had the exact same comment you did (so you're in good company). This is what he said about it:
Several optical physicists at the biggest aerospace companies like James Webb, Starlink, and Keck Observatory. They said, “You can’t make a smaller spot from orbit.” They said, “Light spreads out, you can’t do it.” I said, “What if you use an Inverse Cassegrain.” For weeks, they had to think about it. One guy had been working on the problem for five years. Then they came back and said, “Oh shit, yeah.” Then they said, “It would take up eight times more area in space.” I said, “If it’s eight times cheaper it doesn’t matter.” And they said, “Oh shit, yeah.” One guy said, “It’s impossible to make a Cassegrain linearly scalable.” So I solved that too.
I have no idea what an inverse cassegrain is [antennadesigner.org]. That's beyond my physics knowledge.
Reading the article, he seems to be moving fast and easy with his financial predictions (or maybe that's just the journalist). I'd like to see him give something a little more concrete. I wouldn't be surprised at all if he's going a little slippy on the physics as well.
Re:This is a bad idea (Score:5, Informative)
The idea has been proposed before; the concept is generally known as a "soletta".
Yes, there are problems. The fundamental problem is the 1/2 degree divergence of sunlight, which makes soletta systems require extremely large (and light) mirrors.
The problems are solvable in principle, but it will necessarily be a very large scale system.
Try: https://scholar.google.com/sch... [google.com]
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This is so ludicrous and obviously flawed in so many ways that there is only one conclusion: investment scam.
Never attribute to malice what can better be explained by a moron who didn't study enough at school.
Re:This is a bad idea (Score:4, Informative)
I can do math too and 3.6km corresponds to an altitude of 400km (=3.6/sin(0.5)) ; the same as the ISS so LEO (Low Earth Orbit). Unfortunately, LEO has is a huge problem called Earth's shadow. Look at one the various websites that give the time and date when the ISS is visible from any point on Earth. The time is always a few hours before or after sunrise and sunset but never in the middle of the night. This is because the ISS is entirely in Earth shadows and so is not visible from Earth. The duration of each ISS sighting is usually a few minutes (7m is a long one) and they typically occur once or twice each day. In the best case, about one hundred space mirrors would be required provide a 2 or 3 more hours of power to a given ground station.
The time spend in Earth's shadow could be reduced by increasing the orbit to let's say 5000km or 10000km but the surface of the mirror and of the illuminated area would increase as the distance SQUARED. This is unrealistic.
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Hang on. You're gonna put mirrors that need to hit a specific target on earth in a 90 minute orbit?
You'd have to rotate the mirrors at different speeds during the orbit so that they'd stay on target. Not to mention the different atmospheric angles you're going to hit. Thickness, clouds, etc.
Not that any of this is possible, but wouldn't that be double impossible?
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If the first, then the efficiency of solar pumped lasers is very low, and the cost / size of the laser would be insane. (broadband light pumpe
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This is so ludicrous and obviously flawed in so many ways that there is only one conclusion: investment scam.
The way this is being promoted on Vice (and Slashdot) is suggestive: Crazy idea! But he is a young out of the box thinker! And the CEO of his own company! Disruptive innovation!
Where have we heard these shiny objects being used to push a scam (cough, cough, Theranos, cough, cough).
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This is so ludicrous and obviously flawed in so many ways that there is only one conclusion: investment scam.
Besides the reasons you mentioned, there is also: clouds, extra energy being pumped into the planet's atmosphere (it will cause extra heating), diffraction, animals like to sleep sometimes, etc.
Almost 20 years ago I was talking to a thirty-something who was claiming to have some startup that was trying to capture an asteroid and turn it into a luxury hotel.
I've no doubt this particular dude is completely sincere.
Besides, every once in a while one of these things schemes turns out to work, I doubt this is the one, but society needs a few people running face first into brick walls since once in a blue moon one of the walls turns out to be cardboard.
We are just antsâ¦.. (Score:2)
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Solar panels do not make usable electricity under a full moon.
Oh yeah? I have a 10 sq.ft panel here that powers my wristwatch quite happily under a full moon.
Solar panel... Usable... So there.
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Yes, it is. We saw what happened the last time a mirror was put into space [youtube.com].
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Re:This is a bad idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, for small systems. But pumped hydro [csus.edu] is cheaper and stores more at large scale, where geography allows.
Actually, it might be the best orbital solar (Score:2)
Actually, this basic technique might be the cheapest and safest form of orbital solar.
Putting solar panels in orbit is a heavy, expensive proposition, and pretty inefficient since you have to turn sunlight into electricity, then back into radiation which you beam to a huge receiver on Earth which turns it back into electricity *again*. And the beam that could be relatively easily focussed into a death ray unless it was specifically designed not to (and why would anyone intentionally castrate their orbital
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The amount of light the mirrors would need to reflect is significant. Solar panels do not make usable electricity under a full moon
A few things about the Moon. It is made of relatively dull rock with an albedo of about 12%. The solar mirrors would have an albedo of 90% or so. Also, the moon is smaller than the Earth, so a lot less sunlight is hitting it than the Earth (about 7.69% as much). So spread out over the whole Earth, the sunlight reflecting off the moon would be a lot dimmer than sunlight even if all the sunlight hitting the moon were reflected at Earth. As it stands, the moon is the wrong shape for all the sunlight hitting it
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Tightly focused death rays aren't really an issue with soletta, in fact they actually have the opposite problem - the sun is not a point source, which limits the minimum spot size to (size of sun) / (distance to sun) * (distance to target), which at Earth's distance from the sun works out to about (distance to target)/108
From geostationary you can't get a bright spot smaller than about 333km across. From 1000km up (high enough that atmospheric drag on your giant mirrors hopefully won't rapidly de-orbit th
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--Yah, this was basically the plot of a Pierce Brosnon Bond movie.
Just what we need (Score:5, Funny)
The Earth's climate is heading straight for thermal runaway and this dude wants to redirect more sunlight onto it.
We should be looking into deploying giant sunscreens in orbit instead...
Thermal not a problem [Re:Just what we need] (Score:2)
The Earth's climate is heading straight for thermal runaway and this dude wants to redirect more sunlight onto it.
It's orders of magnitude away from being a problem*, but if it were, the mirrors aren't needed in the daytime, so it would be straightforward to use them to reflect light to space when they aren't over solar farms, or the solar farms don't need more sunlight, and redirect it to the solar arrays when they do need it. You could make it solar neutral.
*(the reason carbon dioxide is a problem is not the waste heat from energy generation, but the fact that while you get the energy from it once, it stays in the a
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It would actually solve the problem.
At a rough estimate, the CO2 released generating 1Wh of energy will reflect 1MWh of additional thermal energy back to Earth before it finally leaves the atmosphere. Get rid of the 1,000,000 to 1 thermal amplification of our energy production, and humans would cease to be a significant source of global warming, and would remain so even if we pumped in 1,000x more extra sunlight than our entire current energy usage.
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That'd completely ruin the night sky (Score:5, Interesting)
hvdc (Score:2)
the power from the Sahara to Germany in an easy way. thats a load of bs
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Filling the Sahara with solar panels and moving the power up to Germany is probably not only more feasible but also cheaper than this pipe dream.
Note that I said "more feasible and cheaper". Not that it's feasible or cheap in the first place.
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Probably - but that will be true of *any* infrastructure at that scale. Even coal plants aren't free.
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How much is a guy with a broom in the desert? :)
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How much is a guy with a broom in the desert? :)
I suppose that depends on their "fringe" skills...
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Show your work so the entire class can benefit
Try this. Its a simple summary graphic so it is easy to absorb. Levelized cost comparisons (LCOE) are readily available from many sources now and all show solar much cheaper that nuclear by a large ratio.
I'd think infrastructure and maintenance costs on that scale would be crazy high. Sadly, I have no data, so I fail.
You would be wrong. That is why people have developed the LCOE measure that combines all costs of power over the lifetime of the system to make all comparisons apples-to-apples. Just guessing is not an effective way to understand things.
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Typo (missed one quote). Try this. [wikipedia.org]
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Eh... well, if we bury the nuke waste in the desert sands, it might be cheaper than the whole solar thing...
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Filling the Sahara with solar panels and moving the power up to Germany is probably not only more feasible but also cheaper than this pipe dream.
Note that I said "more feasible and cheaper". Not that it's feasible or cheap in the first place.
Is this because mentioning a location in Africa makes things not work that work everywhere else? Solar power farms are a very well established commercial activity now, and are cheap compared to other sources of power - MWH by MWH of actual power produced. High voltage DC lines can move power thousands of kilometers from any source and do so at reasonable cost, and do so right now all over the world. There are two power cables from Africa to Europe right now, and several more are being built. 1.2 GW capacity
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It has more to do with transporting that electricity across a vast amount of land and sea and keeping solar panels clean in a place where humans are rare and sandstorms plentiful.
Goldeneye (Score:4, Funny)
So he gets his business plans from watching James Bond movies. If this works then I have an invisible Aston Martin for sale.
ecological impact (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: ecological impact (Score:2)
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I wonder if there might be a way to adjust the frequency of the photons so that they could direct microwave energy down to receivers on Earth. We already have quantum dot TVs that produce blue light and then shift its frequency down to make red and green.
That would deal with one of the biggest issues with space based solar - that you have to use solar PV on the satellite to convert light to electricity, and then convert the electricity to microwave transmissions, and then convert the microwave transmissions
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I wonder if there might be a way to adjust the frequency of the photons so that they could direct microwave energy down to receivers on Earth. We already have quantum dot TVs that produce blue light and then shift its frequency down to make red and green.
Hmmm... I started to question the relevance of your idea as follows: "Once you go as far as needing a passive, or at least mostly-passive, means of directly converting wide-spectrum light into narrow-spectrum microwave energy, I think you might as well just use solar cells and electronic conversion. The passive method would undoubtedly be cool...". I was about to go on and say that there seems to me little advantage there over using solar cells to power microwave oscillators and amplifiers. But when I start
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I wonder if there might be a way to adjust the frequency of the photons so that they could direct microwave energy down to receivers on Earth.
Fascinating idea, but no.
Since the wavelength of optical photons is about 10,000 times shorter than that of microwaves (give or take, depending on what optical wavelength and what microwave band), to get any reasonable efficiency, each incident optical photon would need to produce 10,000 microwave photon. This is way outside the range of frequency shifters,.
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We know that even street lighting interferes with the ecology [nature.com] of an area. This would be much worse.
Who cares about ecology. We're talking about saving the planet here!
Save this news article for another date (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why? Soletta are a completely viable energy collecting mechanism - though this kid seems to have gotten his math wrong by a could orders of magnitude.
Their downside is that thanks to their large spot size (10km is optimistic, and you're talking 333km for a geostationary collector) they really only work at massive scales - to get a daylight bright spot you need orbital mirrors with a total area as big as the bright spot.
If we take the James Webb solar shield layers as a reference you're talking 40,000m2 of
Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a Genius Too! Let's put Solar Panels in Orbit (Score:2)
That way the solar panels get sun 24hrs a day and if positioned properly, will catch solar energy that never makes it to earth anyways. Then we'll have these thousands of satellites with solar panels shoot lasers to transmit the power to a hub in orbit and that hub satellite will have a HUGE FRICKIN LASER and it will shoot energy down to any place on earth. ;-)
What happened to Electricity Cables? (Score:2)
Johnny-come-lately (Score:4, Informative)
The idea of using space mirrors was first proposed by German physicist Hermann Oberth in 1929.
Aiming will be hard (Score:2)
You might be able to make a heliogyro with partial zone plate lenses on strips of mylar, because those are just strips of plastic kept in tension by centrifugal force you could make a huge area focusing reflector for very little weight. Actually aiming it though would be a problem, a heliogyro doesn't turn on a dime.
A heliogyro PV farm in space would just need to aim a central klystron instead of the whole assembly.
Bring back the 80's (Score:2)
A similar idea was pushed by the Soviets back in the 80's. The idea was to have a sattelite that was essentially a large mirror which can re-direct sunlight at a city.
The purpose was not to generate power, but to save energy by not using street lighting.
The orbit of the satellite was to be chosen such that the mirror could provide light to a given city for about 2 hours after sunset.
Additionally, the mirror could have been made of a very thin foil, so the idea was feasible with the technology of the time.
I
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A big issue is focus size and its impact on brightness. The minimum spot size of reflected sunlight at our distance from the sun is roughly (distance to target)/108 - from 1000km up (high enough for a huge mirror to hopefully not rapidly de-obit from atmospheric drag) you're talking a minimum ~10km spot diameter. To make that spot as bright as under a full moon (~1/1,000,000th daylight) would take a mirror 10m across - and you probably want it a lot brighter than that. To reach 1/1,000th daylight (~1w/m2
Another one of these (Score:2)
Inventor? or Reader ? (Score:2)
Scalability (Score:5, Insightful)
He seriously claims that people from aerospace "companies" like James Webb and Keck claimed you couldn't focus light from space? I doubt that. Of course you can, it's not hard to do, it's hard to scale up, and despite his argument that he found how to make it linearly scalable I'd like to see his numbers for $/W that includes cost to deploy.
Fundamentally if his mirror is, say 10 sq m, even if he focuses that really well and it perfectly hits a panel on earth with no losses, it's still at best the equivalent of a 10 sq m solar panel. So if he wants to produce, say a modest 10 MW, for sunlight hitting the mirror at 1 kW/sq m and impinging upon a 20% efficient panel on earth, then he needs 50,000 sq m of mirror area for just 10 MW of power. That's a lot mass to get into space, with control equipment to make it hit the right spot on Earth. Am I missing something in his idea?
If I were investing I'd be very skeptical, especially when someone claims that no one has ever thought about it hard enough.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Am I missing something in his idea?
His plan becomes far more profitable when you realize he now has a 10 MW space based beam weapon he can remotely control from his Mom's basement.
Older, and much better microwave power idea (Score:4, Informative)
Isaac Asimov described using satellites to collect power and retransmit it to Earth as microwaves in 1942. NASA published more mature ideas, basically using solar sail based mirrors to concentrate the power at generators attached to those mirrors.
Essentially, this young inventor has re-invented an 80 year old idea and left out necessary though well understood steps.
Re: Older, and much better microwave power idea (Score:3)
Agreed. There are major issues with microwave beaming as well, but I would argue it's still more viable than this guy's idea.
Although a Vice article isn't the venue to do it, I'd need to see some return on investment calculations, with real numbers for manufacturing, launch, fuel, maintenance, platform lifetime, and deorbiting. Based on how he's describing this in the article, I doubt that he's actually gone through these calculation with the diligence that warrants a $50-100 million round 2.
Wow, where DID he come up with this idea?! (Score:5, Informative)
"Then I was on a run two days later and thought what if I put that thing that turns sunlight into a beam in orbit then you don't have to build a vacuum tube anymore"
Yeah, really? So you were completely unaware of the continual string of such suggestions that have appeared in the press and journals since the 1970s that one trivially finds with "space mirror"? And you never heard of the Znamya project that actually tried launching such a system? And you totally definitely did not hear anything whatsoever about the 2020 University of Glasgow to design super-lightweight mirrors for just this purpose that was covered in the tech press?
It's just money (Score:2)
Hitler proposed a similar concept (Score:2)
A Wunder Weapon to incinerate cities. We see how far he got along with that idea.
My bigger concern is the complete loss of the night sky for astronomers and average citizens alike. Bad enough we have StarLink satellites mucking things up. Imagine have a bright source intentionally lighting up the sky.
And, of course, thereâ(TM)s more energy directed towards earth ⦠more heat.
Bad idea.
if you don't pay me 100 billion dollars I will (Score:2)
if you don't pay me 100 billion dollars I will blow up Washington dc and each major city on the hour
Astronomers (Score:2)
You know those astronomers that give about about SpaceX's (among others) StarLink constellation affecting the dark skies and their observations?
Well they'd like a word...
Soo and kill the biosphere that way? Nice! (Score:3)
Because, you know, plant life and animals (and humans) pretty much evolved to have darkness most nights...
Yeah, what can you expect from an inexperienced 26 year old with an inflated ego?
Unstoppable force stopped by one cloud. (Score:2)
His solution is mirrors and laser beam vacuum tubes...
Why put mirrors in space when you can just put them at the earth's poles, they get full sunlight 24 hours a day for several months each!
Light pollution (Score:2)
Investment scheme (Score:2)
Now
rendering ground-based telescopes useless (Score:2)
Oh yeah — does this guy know about the inverse square law?
Should marry (Score:5, Funny)
He should marry Elizabeth Holmes.
best use for it (Score:2)
at night, to shine daylight onto the homes of all flat-earthers.
I wonder how job interviews go at that company (Score:3)
I mean it's probably rather easy to get money from investors, just look at WeWork or Theranos, marketing can do wonders there.
However once you need technical people, and that company will eventually have to talk to them and perhaps employ a few of them, it will get interesting. I mean there are some highly naive engineers out there, but once they do the math they will probably notice like that sending up the rockets will take _much_ more energy than those mirrors will reflect during their lifetime, or that lead-acid batteries are way more economical even though they are made of literal toxic waste.
Global warming (Score:2)
If there's one thing that is more of a global warming issue than trapping more of the sun's energy rather than letting it re-radiate back into space, it's sending more of the sun's energy down to be trapped.
For some time I'd been concerned about the global warming consequences of solar power's albedo reduction trapping heat - as dark, nearly 100% absorbing, panels are deployed over more reflective materials (such as light sand) for some time - until the "infrared window cooling paint" technologies came alon
If Successful, Will Cause Planet Heating (Score:2)
"inventor" (Score:3)
This is neither a new idea, nor is it a new implementation of an old idea. This is just some guy making up shit. That doesn't make you an "inventor" any more than an 8-year old who draws a bladed death machine on a piece of ruled paper using a 4-color pen.
Re: (Score:2)
That's one solution - but carbon-free energy is a much better return on investment.
Roughly - the CO2 from every 1Wh of fossil energy we generated will reflect 1MWh of additional thermal energy back down to Earth before it leaves the atmosphere.
With a 1,000,000x thermal multiplier on our current dominant energy source, we can bring in a *ridiculous* amount of energy from other sources while still radically reducing global warming.
Re: Oh boy... (Score:2)
Also dung beetles get thrown off by light pollution, especially considering they sometimes use the Milky Way for guidance.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]