Tag Archives: farm

Would it be possible to build a solar power farm with satelites orbiting between the Sun and Earth and beaming this energy straight into thermo-electric plants? Would this work as a double pronged aproach to reduce global warming?

It would probably have to be a satelite belt orbiting Earth. But, suppose that by putting hundreds or thousands of satelites at a time in front of the sun, we could reduce – say 0.01% – of the Sun’s direct radiation and that this energy was beamed directly into thermo power plants. Maybe this could be done with a mirror system or simply using lasers. Then, that extra heat could be partly converted into other forms of energy instead of heat, as would normaly occur.

At the same time, this could avoid the production of heat as a by product of other generating methods, such as nuclear and oil burning thermo-electric, as well as gas build up that would enhance green-house effect.

Supposing we had the technology, would this make a dent on global warming
Okay, since there were a lot of smart answers – some very well thought thru – and I feel none answered my question, I probably wasn’t clear. My bad. This is basically a 2 problem question w/ a lot of details I don’t know sh*t about.

1) A transference problem: how much would the bloking of a % of the suns light impact the trend in temprerature. Make it simple: if a huge asteroid were to fragment into dust and orbit Earth, a percentage of the Sun’s light / heat would be deflected or aborved outside the atmosphere. How does that percentage relate to Earth’s average temperature and trend? That is, how many joules does Earth lose naturally to space and receives from the Sun in a given period? No need to go into SDE. How many satelites would cause a similar efect depend on data like, average satelight area, tranlucense, minimum distance between them and other stuff that, if I knew, I wouldn’t be asking this question, since this is not a speach. All of this is efficiency insensitive.
The second part of the question takes efficiency into account. Say that this system had an efficiency of anything between 5% to 50%, how much impact would this have on gas emission and, thus, global warming? I’m supposing that for every watt generated this way you’d generate one less from fossil fuel.
Finnaly, to the people who said you can’t beam energy, two things: (1) I said if we had the technology; (2) here is a simple, albeit presently very inneficient, way of doing just that: use solar cells to generate electricity to power a laser; point it at a large enough object to be able to capture the heat and use it in a thermo-electric plant. This object could be essentialy the same as the solar panels you use to heat water. It could also be your regular solar farm that would benefit fro the concentrated light. I never said we have the technology to make this cost efficient. It doesn’t have to be near the sun, just out side the atmosphere.

A simpler way is to have several magnifying glasses focussing on a solar farm down on Earth. (Remember when you toyed with one, there would be a real intense circle and a shadowy area around.) That would concentrate more light where it could be transformed into electricity and less where it would be 100% converted to heat, like desert or ocean.
Goring: yours was the most important point (block the view of the Sun) but what if we could just dim it a little and you could lie down in it without having to spread tons of lotions?

I’m kind of pale myself, but I do look sharp in sun glasses.