Microwave scattering is an absolute nightmare over that kind of distance. Even for much shorter distances, microwaves are only practical to transport over a couple of meters in a waveguide.
If its transmitting to a base station, we can assume it’s in geosynchronous orbit, or about 22,000 miles from the surface. With a fairly large dish on the satellite, you could probably keep the beam fairly tight until it hit the atmosphere, but that last ~100 miles of air would scatter it like no tomorrow. Clouds and humidity are also a huge problem – water is an exceptionally good absorber in most of the MW band.
I saw numbers reported for the transmission efficiency somewhere (will update this if I can find it again), and they were sub-30%. The other 70% is either boiling clouds on its way down, or missing the reviever on the ground and gently cooking the surrounding area.
Hoo boy that’s pretty light on details about scale, there’s a few buzz words in there too, I hope they can develop it enough to make it viable in large capacities.
I like that they gloss over the whole “transmitted to earth” portion of the system.
They use microwaves for it:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-beam-solar-power-to-earth-from-space-for-first-time-ever/
Microwave scattering is an absolute nightmare over that kind of distance. Even for much shorter distances, microwaves are only practical to transport over a couple of meters in a waveguide.
If its transmitting to a base station, we can assume it’s in geosynchronous orbit, or about 22,000 miles from the surface. With a fairly large dish on the satellite, you could probably keep the beam fairly tight until it hit the atmosphere, but that last ~100 miles of air would scatter it like no tomorrow. Clouds and humidity are also a huge problem – water is an exceptionally good absorber in most of the MW band.
I saw numbers reported for the transmission efficiency somewhere (will update this if I can find it again), and they were sub-30%. The other 70% is either boiling clouds on its way down, or missing the reviever on the ground and gently cooking the surrounding area.
As in it’s slightly but not perceptively warmer or more like “oh god, we’re all going to die”?
Depends on how much power is being transmitted to each base station, but it would have to be a colossal satellite to be “we’re all going to die”.
I pointed that out mostly as a limitation on how much power could be transmitted to each base station.
Hoo boy that’s pretty light on details about scale, there’s a few buzz words in there too, I hope they can develop it enough to make it viable in large capacities.
To be fair, the source I gave isn’t anything like a journal or technical document for specifics.
Well, the headline at least says it ‘could’.
Yeah that’s fair