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Palau May Get Satellite Power In the Next Decade
davidwr writes "The island nation of Palau is looking into creating a satellite-to-ground power transmission system. The system would use low-orbit satellites to transmit power to a receiver in bursts, unlike some other plans which rely on geostationary satellites. The initial 1-megawatt project is supposed to go online 'as early as' 2012 for a cost of $0.8 billion. Time will tell if this can be made cost-effective compared to traditional solar or other sources of power."
explosions aren't the problem with this power level, inducing currents in conductive materials like say electronics is. more powerful versions with a tighter beam may be able to do physical damage rather than electronuc damage but they are likely a few years off.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
They're paying $800 per watt, when a company is now shipping solar panels that cost under $1/watt, AND have a single, expensive point of failure? What is the point of beaming solar energy down from space, to a tropical island?
Ground-based solar including panels and batteries could be built local to each home or village, at a fraction of the cost of this over-engineered idea.
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Hmmm, 1MW for $0.8B, that's $800/Watt. About 800x the cost of coal, and 200x the cost of old-school photovoltaics. That's quite a lot of ground to make up, especially given that presumably the largest component of expense -- launch costs -- have a very low likelihood of improving by this factor until something like the space elevator comes along.
This story seems like a hoax. The nation of Palau has only 20,000 people, and a annual GDP of $160M. Are they really going to invest in a single R&D project that costs five times their national GDP? I call BS.
I don't get how satellites can be cheaper than simply setting up bunches of solar panels on the ground. Putting poundage into space and managing it is damned expensive, let alone the precision aiming technology. I don't get the accounting here. Please help me, I'm a doctor, not an accountant (well ok, I'm not actually a doc, but it makes a better cliche).
Table-ized A.I.
it may be right, but for the wrong reasons. skin color isn't going to make a difference when being hit by a misaligned microwave beam. use white and brown eggs in your own microwave to test this theory.
so their plan is to put a solar panel in space... because solar radiation is 8 times more powerful... umm... I'm pretty sure that putting the same surface area of solar panels in space is going to cost *way* more than 8 times as much as putting it on the ground.
Then of course there's the idea that we will somehow magically "beam" the energy to the ground. Here's an idea, we let the sunlight beam itself to the ground, instead of putting an enormous expensive satellite as an unnecessary intermediary in the process.
This is one of the sci fi ideas that sounds cool in a story because it involves big machines and lasers, but is totally nonsensical when you actually take ten seconds to think about it. File this in the same category as giant fighting robots and transporter beams.
> it may be right, but for the wrong reasons. skin color isn't going to make a difference when being hit by a misaligned microwave beam. use white and brown eggs in your own microwave to test this theory.
Oh, he's right for the right reasons.
The U.S. has a history of testing their weapons on brown people first.
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