Solar Energy in Space is not Necessarily Easy to Harvest (Video)

The ARTEMIS Innovation web site says, "John C. Mankins, President of Artemis Innovation Management Solutions LLC, is an internationally recognized leader in space systems and technology innovation...." And one of John's biggest recent projects is coming up with a practical way to collect solar energy beyond our atmosphere and use it not only in space, but how to beam it down to the Earth's surface where we can use it to power our plug-in cars, household appliances, and other electrical devices.

Comments

Adding energy to Earth

[presidenteloco]

I just want to point out that solar energy captured by most of these satellites would have missed the Earth otherwise.

So we would be adding extra energy to the Earth, energy which would degrade with use to, you guessed it, heat.

Has anyone done the math on this to see whether doing this would actually help in the effort to limit global warming?

I suspect that the added heat would be tiny compared to displaced fossil fuel-burning carbon emission heat-trapping, but just though someone should crunch the numbers to make sure we wouldn't be shooting ourselves in the foot with this technology.