


New advances in power transmission would make Tesla proud










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RE: efficiency
By menace on 9/15/2008 4:01:34 PM , Rating: 2
It's only 2x like higher but also you only get effectively 20-50% of the time with good direct sunlight (depending on location, climate, and time of the year). The satellite of course would be capable of beaming down energy almost continuously (with rare blackouts in the earth's umbra) while ground based solar is intermittent and would require energy storage. A satellite system would not need storage but on the minus side it would be very expensive to lift all those satellites into orbit. I think you might need to have at least 20% transmission efficiency just to break even with ground based solar.

RE: efficiency
By masher2 (blog) on 9/15/2008 4:37:06 PM , Rating: 2
There's a few other factors besides eliminating atmospheric absorption and clouds. In the right location, you can eliminate the day/night cycle entirely, obviating the need for energy storage. You can also direct the beam, meaning you can easily power areas in Nothern latitudes, without needing thousands of miles of lossy electrical cables.

Furthermore, there's no weather in space, so your panels stay clean and don't take wind and hail damage, and there's no gravity, so you can build massive concentrator systems cheaply, since they don't need to support their own weight.

On the downside, you have the enormous cost of lifting anything into space, plus the exhorbitant cost of servicing the system, should anything ever go wrong with it.

