Solar power station from China would send energy from space
Chinese scientists are planning to build an enormous 0.6-mile or 1 km solar power station that will sit at over 20,000 miles or 32,000 km above the Earth. As well as constant sunlight, a space based solar power station would see energy density ten times higher than anything you’d see on a solar panel on your roof. This is because there is no atmosphere to dampen any solar energy.
With modern solar panels being far more efficient than a few decades ago, they still face obstacles, including bad weather and nighttime. But China believes it could collect solar energy from space and send it back down to earth.
But how does it send that power back down to earth? It converts it into microwave radiation which is then beamed to a fixed antenna, according to Popular Mechanics.
“We are working on this project now,” Long Lehao, a rocket scientist and member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), told SMCP. “It is as significant as moving the Three Gorges Dam to a geostationary orbit 36,000km (22,370 miles) above the Earth.”
The country’s Three Gorges Dam, a hydroelectric power station, opened in 2012 and provides an astonishing 100 billion kWh annually. According to long, the energy collected in a single year from the solar power station is “equivalent to the total amount of oil that can be extracted from the Earth.”
The dam was an enormous project, taking nearly two decades to finish and this project is expected to be no different. The complicated process required to get everything up into orbit means it could take years before it is operational.
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