Thinking Solar
. By C. Jake Williams
. May 7, 2010
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In 2008 the sun produced enough energy to handle Earth's demands a thousand times over, while solar energy provided the planet only 0.02% of the energy consumed. That's potential for a 5 million fold improvement!

I think about energy a lot. The problem I see is that although energy is everywhere, all around us, our species has not found a permanent renewable solution. It seems to me that solving this problem would prevent numerous evils in this world including:

-Wars for energy resources such as the Iraqi conflicts of the Bush administrations

-Petroleum companies having a major influence in American politics

-Energy shortages

-Pollution

-Global warming

-The inability some nights for an observer to see the Milky Way

There are many more but the items above are of greatest concern to me, especially the first as it can threaten our country's identity and the last because I like to look up.

The most obvious source of energy is the source of all life, our sun. Unfortunately, solar power as currently conceived it not a viable answer on the world scale. Basically, the intensity of the power is not sufficient compared to electric, chemical, and nuclear power sources.

We are too far from the sun.

Here's my idea; maybe it's unrealistic but perhaps it is worth the effort when you consider the list above.

The intensity of power on a surface, or irradiance, is determined by an amount of energy divided by the area that energy acts upon. When you consider the sun's energy you can think of that area as the surface area of a sphere, which is given by A_surface=4*pi*radius².

This means that as the distance from the sun doubles, the intensity of the light is one-fourth its original magnitude.

Earth is an average distance of 150 million kilometers from the sun. Mercury's average is 57 million km. The irradiance of the sun's energy at the average distance of Mercury is seven times greater than here on Earth! The distances from the sun are averages because the planets' orbits are ellipses, not circles.

Collecting energy closer to the sun makes sense from a magnitude standpoint.

But then what?

The only remaining problems are getting the energy from the collection site to a satellite above the Earth, then to the surface.

A laser could potentially handle the former. This idea is addressed in the book I, Robot. Don't confuse the book with the movie; they overlap very little.

Getting the energy to Earth's surface from a satellite could also be done by a laser, or at worst a huge hanging cable from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit.

I'm no physicist, sorry dad, but it seems like this could work. Also, it would give the US a Huge advantage over countries that rely on chemical resources long term.

You were there.