[ExI] More ranting on power sats

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Mon Aug 13 17:00:24 UTC 2012


On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 10:43 AM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>wrote:

> > (Now, if you meant to say "anthropogenic", that's another kettle of
> fish ...)
>
> > Talk about one the spell checker is *not* going to find.  :-)
>

With the voice synthesizer on my Mac "kettle of fish" and "kettle of ghoti"
sound exactly the same. George Bernard Shaw hated English spelling and said
that if you used the same rules of pronunciation and spelling that are used
in the words tough, women, and nation then the word "Fish" should be
spelled as "Ghoti". I guess the good people at Apple remembered Shaw.

> > But the microwave power density from satellites would be even more
>> dilute than sunlight and thus you'd need even more land area to collect the
>> energy.
>>
>
> > The higher efficiency of converting microwaves to electric power lets
> the power per unit are be about the same as PV,


If it can't do better than vanilla photovoltaics one can't help but ask if
putting an object larger than a supertanker into geosynchronous orbit is
really worth the gargantuan cost.

> about 99% of the time.
>

I assume that means when its not raining.

> It's a time of low demand


I can see that 3am would be a time of low demand, but this would be around
noon.

> and if you have a grid, then we can "cross the beams" to keep the grid
> fed from power sats out of the shadow.
>

This problem like all problems is solvable, but it's going to take even
more money and we're already talking about astronomical sums. If we can't
get fusion to work I say fission Thorium reactors are a better long term
solution.

  John K Clark
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