Out-of-this-world proposal for solar wind power

[n2doc]

14:00 24 September 2010 by Charles Choi

Forget wind power or conventional solar power, the world's energy needs could be met 100 billion times over using a satellite to harness the solar wind and beam the energy to Earth – though focussing the beam could be tricky.

The concept for the so-called Dyson-Harrop satellite begins with a long metal wire loop pointed at the sun. This wire is charged to generate a cylindrical magnetic field that snags the electrons that make up half the solar wind. These electrons get funnelled into a metal spherical receiver to produce a current, which generates the wire's magnetic field – making the system self-sustaining.

Any current not needed for the magnetic field powers an infrared laser trained on satellite dishes back on Earth, designed to collect the energy. Air is transparent to infrared so Earth's atmosphere won't suck up energy from the beam before it reaches the ground.

Back on the satellite, the current has been drained of its electrical energy by the laser – the electrons fall onto a ring-shaped sail, where incoming sunlight can re-energise them enough to keep the satellite in orbit around the sun.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19497-outofthisworld-proposal-for-solar-wind-power.html

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

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[NNadir]

2. That should be ready for use, by um, um, um...

...when is climate change supposed to start again?

I forget.

:eyes:

It is interesting how often we fantasize about these literally pie in the sky schemes here in the Western world when earth's atmosphere is collapsing right now.

What is even more interesting is the United States lack of launch capacity to do simple things, never mind sci fi stuff continually hyped here.

After 50 years of this talk - tidal, solar, space crap, fusion etc, etc, etc, - the main source of energy on this planet is still dangerous fossil fuels. It is interesting that the only form of energy that is mature and works on scale - that would be nuclear energy - invented by some of the greatest minds in human history, routinely gets dissed.

It won't happen.

[davidinalameda]

3. fossil fuels are still cheaper than anything else

people don't care about the future; they only care about right now

as long as their electric bill is low, we could burn human corpses and people would be okay with that