Power Satellites & Space Based Solar Power

What people said

mchusma · 2021-02 · Strong recommendation

Power satellites like this are one of the first great possible ways to put industry in space. We need early economic reasons to get there. Issac Arthur usually has the best overview of topics like this [VIDEO]

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voodootrucker · 2020-12 · Recommendation

Solar panels perform 2x better in space, and also you could beam it down day or night so you don't need to worry as much about storage. [LINK] Edit: re-watching that, the economics doesn't sound great. Edit 2: a more in depth video [VIDEO]

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jmyeet · 2024-10 · Reference

I'll keep saying this until I'm blue in the face: solar power is the future. It is the only form of power generation that directly genreates power rather than turning a turbine. As such it has no moving parts (apart from, maybe, an array that gets tilted to face the Sun for higher efficiency but that's optional) and has no emissions. The cost of solar power has plummetted in the last 2 decades and nobody is quite sure where this will bottom out. Now obviously sometimes it's night time and sometimes it's just cloudy. You have a number of options for this, in increasing level of engineering and technological difficulty: 1. Do nothing. Just take power when it is available. This works surprisingly well for a lot of our power usage. Power usage peaks in daylight hours so solar reduces your baseload requirements. Sometimes you can simply do things when the weather doesn't permit (eg data centers). 2. Store excess power in another form. This could be batteries but it could also be things like sequestering carbon from the air into a hydrocarbon form you can later burn for power. This is carbon neutral by definition. This method currently isn't economic. In some cases that doesn't matter (eg in cold climates where current batteries aren't particularly effective). 3. Power satellites that bean down power. A solar collector in space would produce ~7 times as much power as a terrestrial collector because there's no day/night or weather interruptions nor atmospheric loss. It is technicall

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