Comment on If God had wanted us to have nearly unlimited clean energy, He would have placed a fusion reactor into the sky.

• HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  the power plant is in space and beams energy to the dish.

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  • chunes@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Right, but like… whatever you’re doing in space is going to be more cost effective to do on earth. Not to mention the insane amount of energy lost to the atmosphere

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    • saturn57@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Energy loss for wireless energy transition is actually surprisingly low. Here is an example of 80% efficiency over 1 kilometer: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1123672

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      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Energy loss for wireless energy transition is actually surprisingly low.

        …

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    • vithigar@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Unless you really need to optimise for land use. An arbitrarily large solar array in space could transmit to a fairly small collector in the surface.

      As for losing power to atmospheric attenuation, high frequency microwaves will pass right through most everything that would scatter visible light. Clouds, dust, etc wouldn’t really impede it.

      I won’t say it’s not a silly idea, because it is. It’s fun to think about though.

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      • EvilHankVenture@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        You could also have a constellation of satellites with area greater than the surface of the earth. It’s not that silly of an idea.

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    • Zron@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Big solar panel

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    • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      musk wants datacenters in space. which makes sense, 24/7 sunlight and no transmission of power is grand; but I do wonder about the shielding and moving the data back and forth.

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      • mattyroses@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        It’s nonsense, for cooling reasons alone

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    • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      yeah but imagine you can put the plant and all the pollution on an asteroid or something.

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• exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  It basically doesn’t work out.

  Theoretically you could have 2500 square meters of solar arrays above the weather beaming the power down to a dish with only a 500 square meter footprint.

  But you’d still have to deal with weather with some kind of a storage solution. And 2500 square meters of area in space seems more expensive to claim than just 500 square meters of area on land, in pretty much any scenario.

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