Solar on the Moon?

4,400,000 km² of solar cells? On the moon?

Never happen.

I think the real purpose is to simply generate attention to this company.

PR gimmick.

Guffaw maybe.

Oh for pities sake not that old 'transmitted energy' baloney yet again
getting a decent wirless signal is hard enough, never mind trying to transmit power to a moving target.
Sheesh... from a geostationary satelite there's a slim chance you could transmit power to an area devoid of poulation like some suitable desert...
Dunno why am I bothering.
Just 'cos there's a bunch of suits in an office and some graphics, doesn't mean it will work..
Jeez the bankers all wear suits QED.
Del

These people really need a reality check. What is the Earth supposed to do with all the additional waste heat that needs to be radiated back into space? - Melt a few ice caps with it?

Guys,

this is a real madcap of an idea. The basic thought was there in the 1970s when the Solar power programme was aimed at using the sun's energy to create a power source to fire up a klystron or magnetron and then focus the beam(s) produced into an area on the Earth where the Rectantenna would provide a DC power source.

Problems, we need efficiencies out of all the processes in the chain to aim for 90% otherwise the power captured would just warm up the earth's atmosphere before heating, through spill-over the area around the recantenna farms. A lot of papers were written in that period and I . certainly never saw anything worth while. The most useful part of the plan at the time was to set aside some portion of the spectrum before we all died from radiation of some form or other. 2450 MHz? if I remember correctly.

I cannot see any way of using this idea to create useful power safely and without harm to the environment.

Sleepy

If indeed the energy could be transmitted as microwaves to an antenna array and the DC produced is sent over the distribution lines (as either high voltage DC, or high voltage AC), one has a simple efficiency requirement: the at ground level conversion efficiency must meet or exceed present generation efficiency. I do not think this will too hard for electrical engineers to tackle. Of course, there are several issues to be dealt with. One of which is a system of high tech tracking diagnostics, and a low specific energy beam that is not harmful to life forms. The efficiency of solar conversion at the moon is immaterial to planetary ecology. We burn all types of non-renewable fuel now, and the planet does not seem to warm up very much.

There's just that one nagging little detail that no one has addressed.

How to transport the materials and manpower to the moon to build the 4,400,000 m2 of solar panels and cabling and controls and etc. etc. etc. necessary to make this all work, within the next 100 years.

There were discussions regarding actually creating the panels on the moon by building mining and fabrication plants (both automated and manned options). Breakthroughs in 3D printing brought these ideas to light again.

I think you can see the additional problems this would create.

Beaming solar power to Earth from the Moon would surely "take the heat" off wind farms for killing birds.

Yes, now there will be pre-cooked Thanksgiving feasts falling from the sky.

If the μ-wave/laser beam is wide enough, it can also solve the recent (40ft)³ oven problem.

I like the 24 hour solar production angle

This is the most lunatic idea I heard in many years.

Lets replace co2 concerns with ionized gas channels short circuiting the atmosphere a different points (I like the cooked birds falling from the sky, I would not enjoy a plane though...). All of this produced by killer rays from the moon. Just the heat losses in the atmosphere at reception will be tremendous and the losses during usage will make it worst.

This is a supplementary source of heat for the planet. Think (global warming)²

How much energy would we spend to install this on the moon? Even if we figure out a way to have a lunal plant that automatically produce the solar cells in situ?

We should start by using proper insulation in our buildings to reduce our consumption...

just run the wire next to a space elevator, with a little paint no one will even notice it's there

LOL, AH you came up with another great idea...

here !ya go!

Wont Work!!!

You need a giant tension spring on the cable since the Moon's orbit is not perfectly circular.

Then you need a huge ring bearing around the equator so the cable can follow the Moon.

no problem, it'll be ready by lunch

Nah, we'll just put a really tall mooring mast with slip rings up in the Arctic Ocean and fly the moon like a kite. The catenary will take care of the orbital variances. Much easier than the tracks around the equator.

Better start buying up property on the Moon real soon so you can lease it to this company! You'll probably make as much as they will with this idea!

Why bother with the moon- just set up the system on earth???

I am a little surprised they haven't made a crappy SyFi channel movie using this old concept.

Something about an accident with the beam guidance drifting off course and turning it into a death-ray from above to chase the protagonists down the road using poor CGI. In the end they disable the beam by using a lunar eclipse.

Errrr.... Please Sir!
Me Sir!
Errr... doesn't the sun already beam energy to us direct?
Yeah but the Moon can get it all the time.... yeah but it can only beam it to any point that's facing the moon,,, so it's not much better than the sun...?

D'uh
Let's replace a power source in a non synchronous orbit with a different power souce in non synchronouse orbit!
Genius!
Del
(slaps furry head with paw)

Silly cat!

Direct beaming of solar energy to the earth from the sun doesn't make any yen for the forward thinking genius in Japan.

Too bad his company can't come up with a plan to solve the "Funik Shama" nuclear disaster still festering in his homeland.

No yen there, I guess.

Damn, I wish I wasn't so negative all the time.

I seem to remember a similar thing being written by Isaac Asimov or some other Scifi writer.

It's a great idea.... but the amount of fuel just to get ONE rocket up there, let alone the thousands required.... imaging the cost per KWh!!

We can never lift all that stuff to the moon. Start small with a small solar cell array. Then use that power to build a factory, of local materials, to make more solar cells. It should take more than twenty years to double the number of cells on the moon. Build another factory, and double again. One should have enough cells in a few centuries, but half of them will have failed. Meanwhile, the cost of financing it all, interest compounding for centuries... Oh, and the waste heat from the transmitters. How to get rid of it? How many thousand tons of lunar copper or whatever will it take to conduct the heat from the transmitters and radiate it to space? Many years ago a company asked me to consult re: a similar scheme. I gave a similar answer. They decided not to pursue it.

And the environmental lunatics will have a cow (that jumps over the Moon)!