Space-Based Solar Power
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Solar Panels Floating in Space Could One Day Power Your Home / Bloomberg
File this under “maybe someday neat and useful,” though there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about it at the moment.
Basically, there’s a theory that if we could install solar panels in space—maybe in orbit around Earth, maybe further out, at one of our Lagrange points—we could continuously capture solar energy from the Sun (even when it’s dark on the surface of the planet, and without the lost photons reflected and absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere) and then beam that energy back down to Earth, maybe via microwaves.
Those microwaves would probably be funneled to towers that would receive them, almost like radio signals, and that energy would then be distributed around the globe.
There’s a lot of “probably”s and “maybe”s in that explanation because this isn’t something we’ve tested on any real scale—so much of it is pure theory at the moment.
That said, a Chinese company called Longi Green Energy Technology Co. (the world’s biggest solar tech manufacturer) is sending some of its solar panels into space to test some aspects of this concept, at this point to see if their panels would even survive in space (and what would be required to allow them to survive, if not).
Also: Ethereum just completed The Merge—here’s how much energy it’s saving
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