Comment on Solar panels in space could cut Europe's renewable energy needs by 80%
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 1 day agoTrivial amounts compared to the solar energy hitting the entire surface of half the Earth.
The problem isn’t incoming energy, it’s outgoing energy. Greenhouse gases reduce the amount of energy radiated back into space and that’s what increases the mean global temperature.
Adding a few hundred square miles of surface area wouldn’t change much.
echodot@feddit.uk 23 hours ago
That’s not what they are talking about.
They’re talking about instability in the electrical grid. If we could just snap our fingers and have instant fusion power tomorrow we still couldn’t actually use it because the demand of electricity wouldn’t keep up with the supply.
Yes you can store power in batteries and via other methods but only to a certain point, you can consider that storage to just be demand, but beyond that you start to have issues with grid stability. You have to start inventing ways of wasting that power just to get rid of it. As more energy intensive technologies come online you make less and less use of that mitigating technology. Of course the better thing to do would be simply to keep supply roughly in line with demand, which means we don’t invent massive energy generating systems if we don’t yet need them.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I’m not sure I understand. Our problem isn’t that we have too much electricity, it’s that the demand for electricity exceeds the production from renewable sources and forces us to rely on burning fossil fuels.
If we replaced all of the coal and gas generation with fusion it would be an immediate improvement. The energy output of controlled fusion can be adjusted in real-time to match the grid needs, exactly like fossil fuels generation.
One of the points of space based solar was that you don’t need batteries.
Terrestrial solar needs energy storage technology because the sun doesn’t shine at night. That’s not true for space based solar, it is always in the sun so the power output is reliable and controllable.
echodot@feddit.uk 13 hours ago
Space-based solar would generate orders of magnitude more power than we actually have a use for.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
It would generate as much or as little power as we design it to. As little as a single solar panel or a multi-gigawatt array.
Even in operation it wouldn’t overproduce electricity. We have people, grid managers, who’s entire job is to coordinate all of the generation sources on the grid so that they adjust their output in order to match demand and maintain grid stability.
Our generation capacity is always higher than normal demand, but all generation methods have the ability to control their output.