(Solar) Power to the Masses 471
D3 writes "This report on a solar power tower (pdf) looks extremely interesting. Maybe one day we can have international power lines where all the countries with lots of sunshine provide power to the rest of the world? How cool would that be?" The NY Times has a good article on solar power in Japan.
Google link / Mirror (Score:4, Informative)
PDF Mirror [fuckingpimp.com]
Re:Google link / Mirror (Score:5, Funny)
So does that mean I can buy one for $40,000?
Re:Google link / Mirror (Score:3, Informative)
Except that most houses these days are mass produced, cookie-cutter homes. Travel to any suburb you want and this will be instantly apparent. Take two houses that are architecturally identical and aligned t
At last.... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:At last.... (Score:5, Informative)
global warming: increase in heat-retaining gasses reduce dissipation of energy from the plaent/atmosphere. since the input of energy from the sun remains constant, mean temperatures rise.
ozone depletion: stratospheric ozone (o3) blocks high-frequency solar radiation on its way to the earth's surface. less o3 means more high-frequency radiation.
since solar panels (photovoltaics) are more effective with high-frequency radiation, ozone depletion increases their output.
global warming just sucks
Re:At last.... (Score:3, Informative)
No, as a matter of fact, they are not. When the frequency is higher, the excess energy is wasted
as heat. Not only is it not used, but it heats the panels and makes them even less effective.
Work has been going on for some time on panels that can use the full spectrum, or at least a wider
swath of it.
Global Cooling/Warming/ Greenhouse Effect (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:At last.... (Score:2, Interesting)
And, of course, there's always the fear of global cooling, which would put us into another iceage and take out tons of inland cities not prepared to deal with the barren landscape. Not to mention the fact that europe would be decimated if another ice age happened, they'd have to take over africa again and live amoungst their ancient mistakes
Discover magazine had a good article (Score:5, Informative)
EnergyInovations [energyinnovations.com] is working on a small version. From the Discover article it discusses how they refined the stirling engine [howstuffworks.com] with the best tradeoffs [energyinnovations.com] of manufacturing costs to effiency. IIRC they are also making this small enough to make it fit on a roof top.
Geek fact of the day: A stirling engine is an external combustion engine that runs off the pressure created when one side of its engine gets very hot while the other side stays cool. The greater the temperature difference, the greater the pressure, the greater the energy generated.
Another Stirling use. (Score:4, Interesting)
British Gas to launch individual CHP boiler for homes [edie.net]
British Gas has announced that it is developing a household boiler that generates both heat and electricity, which will increase energy efficiency and cut costs for customers, allowing them to sell excess electricity back to the Grid.
The new combined heat and power (CHP) boilers, developed by MicroGen Energy
Think about it. You burn gas to stay warm. (if you don't have a heating season....then you don't) Why not burn the gas to do work? You still get your heat. And the work can make electricity.
Re:Discover magazine had a good article (Score:2)
Re:Discover magazine had a good article (Score:2)
The trouble I see with the units described in the Discover article were space efficiency (need a big roof, just to power my computers) and heat danger (oops, just ignited that pigeon that tried to land on my solar power unit, now I've got a flaming pigeon on my shake roof).
Re:Discover magazine had a good article (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Discover magazine had a good article (Score:5, Interesting)
Very good questions, as it happens, I have answers!
In California it costs around $15-$20K to refit a house with solar panels. Due to recent legislation the power company MUST pay the wholesale price to any of their customers who generate power. It takes around 20 years for the cost of the panels to be recouped.
Note that these numbers assume that the cost of power stays stable, which is fairly unlikely. If the cost per kilowatthour increases then it will take proprotionately less time for the panels to pay for themselves. A long term investment, but ultimately worthwhile.
In terms of pure energy costs (neverminding money) it takes a typical solar panel about three years to generate the amount of energy it took to produce. Some panels are made from recycled wafers (typically wafers which were rejected for chip manufacture) these take about 3 months to make the electricity that went into their production.
A couple of corrections (Score:5, Informative)
- a "typical" residential system (2.4kW AC peak output) is going to run $9000-12000 after the state rebate
- there's also a 15% state tax credit
- the utility buyback of power is called "net metering" and they actually pay the retail price for the power (i.e. they credit you for power you produce at the same rate they charge you for what you use)
As to one of the original, unaswered questions: if you don't have batteries (and you don't need them if you are grid connected), the only maintenance required is hosing off the panels a couple of times a year. The panels are warranteed for 25 years, and generally good for much longer.
Re:Discover magazine had a good article (Score:4, Informative)
The reason is because the most expensive (in terms of energy) part of manufacturing anything based on a silicon wafer is growing the initial crystal.
The crystal must be perfect, a single bubble, crack, or deformity, makes the whole bloody thing worthless (as an aside: this is why some chip makers drool at the prospect of an orbital chip fabber, growing crystals is much easier in microgravity).
After you have your perfect crystal you turn it into wafers and "print" the microchip circutry on the wafer. The problem is that there is a fairly high chance of the printing process going wrong, which results in a rejected wafer. This is where the cheap solar panels come in. They buy the rejected wafers, scrub the failed chip off, and print the solar panel on the scrubbed wafer. Solar panels are more durable and less picky than chips, being printed on a scrubbed wafer doesn't bother them at all.
The resultant solar cell is just as good as one made on a fresh wafer. Since they didn't grow the wafer (and it would have been scrapped anyway) they count only the energy cost of scrubbing and printing the panel on the recycled wafer. I suppose if you want to get picky you could claim it costs the same as a normal panel, since energy was spent growing the crystal in the first palce, but I think its fair to discount that since the energy would have been wasted (bad wafer).
Re:Discover magazine had a good article (Score:5, Informative)
is a better solution...
I have my cabin on the lake heated and powered without buying heatoil or electricity... and it's in northern michigan.
you can do it. and you can do it now. you just need to have a desire that outweighs the convience of simply paying a bill.
Re:Discover magazine had a good article (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's going to make electricity cheaper... (Score:5, Funny)
International distribution - no go. (Score:5, Insightful)
Great idea, but power simply can't be distributed over that great a distance.
To make up for losses due to resistance in wires, they up the voltage to absurd levels -- decreasing the current level, and, in the process, the voltage drop over a long distance. However, this can only be taken so far, and towers supplying electricity to the rest of the planet is way too far.
In fact, I'm pretty sure that the continental US is too wide for coast-to-coast power sharing (that is, power generated in, say, New York, can only be "shipped" as far west as Indiana, or so).
On the other hand, replace today's wires with some kind of high-current, high-temperature superconductor, and you're golden.
Re:International distribution - no go. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:International distribution - no go. (Score:2)
Re:International distribution - no go. (Score:2)
In many parts of the world, you could reach twenty countries at that distance.
Re:International distribution - no go. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:International distribution - no go. (Score:2)
oh no? as far as I can tell, Canada (where I live) sells power to the US quite frequently, and vice-versa, depending on the month, and whose reactors are up/down.
the whole power grid allows for this type of 'sharing', but it co$t$ to buy it.....
(mainly because you need it, and we got it , economy.)
Re:International distribution - no go. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:International distribution - no go. (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly correct, need hydrogen (Score:3, Insightful)
Hydrogen fuel cells are being oversold by many people, but this is one thing that they would be great for.
Better: Local generation using combined solar/wind (Score:5, Informative)
That's not a big deal here, where we already have a grid, but it's a huge, huge deal in the third world.
The combined solar/wind thing works like this. Electricity demands have a thing called a "load shape" - basically demand graphed against time. It turns out that solar energy supplies match the load shape of things like air conditioners pretty well, but when the clouds come out, your solar supply goes to hell.
However, wind systems work best when there's a sudden change in temperature, causing new low or high pressure areas, so usually cloudy days have ample wind. If you combine local solar and wind systems in a single "local area grid" you get a hybrid system which produces power in almost exactly the same loadshape as your actual demand, reducing expensive overcapacity, and with excellent availability in all weather conditions.
Renewable energy requires a lot more smarts than "this is a huge factory which produces megawatts a day" - you don't see nearly the full benefit unless you actually take advantages of the full range of renewable solutions, using factors like their modularity, size, loadshape matching, low capital requirements, grid independence and many other subtle factors.
Small is Profitable [smallisprofitable.org] is a hard read: about 400 pages of really densely argued financial and technical analysis, but it's pretty much the definitive work in the area. If you want to know more, it's the book to get.
but then (Score:5, Funny)
Re:but then (Score:4, Funny)
Re:but then (Score:2)
Re:but then (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:but then (Score:4, Insightful)
So quit your US baaaad sheepspeak and get your head out of your ass, mmmmkay?
Re:but then (Score:3, Interesting)
Second, when you said "feasible", you meant "profitable". Certainly such a power plant is feasible; it has already been done!
Third, regarding the profitability, just how many of these solar tower power plants do you think we could be building with the $5,000,000,000 per month that the USA is spending to be in Iraq? Not to mention the $100,000,000,000 that we already spent getting t
Re:Thus (Score:3, Funny)
Re:but then (Score:2)
Transmission is weak link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Transmission is weak link (Score:3, Informative)
if one was to transfer energy from Mexico to Canada (and only God knows why we would do this), it would be transfered from the Mexican border, to the American border. The American border would then sell it up the chain. In the end, it would be an American Border state, that would sell to Canada...the idea of the power is that it is the same, but in reality, it
Re:Transmission is weak link (Score:2)
Sure price fixing and all that (seperate discussion in possible flame war below), but I wonder if this is a factor? BC to California isn't the shortest distance.
A bright idea by any other name (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A bright idea by any other name (Score:2)
> Back in my day I had to write games in BASIC, on a 4.7Mhz computer with no hard disk and 128K of RAM. And I was grateful.
So did I, but for the first year I did it without dos or a tape drive, meaning I couldn't save.
Re:A bright idea by any other name (Score:2)
This isn't really big in the US right now, but it's big in Japan. For a US practitioner see Solargenix (just one example).
like in the California (Score:5, Funny)
I'm really not this bitter in person.
Government involvement (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course electric companies would complain, but they will still be needed, solar power won't provide enough power.
hmm...actually then my electric company would just charge more for less so they don't lose profits...damn
Re:Government involvement (Score:5, Insightful)
Why take the money in the form of taxes, pass it through the government mess, and then dole it back out again? Why not just make the solar panels deductible? Then you avoid a wasteful bureaucracy to manage the subsidies. 100% of the cost goes into the panels. As people buy them, competition heats up, and they become affordable to an increasing number of people.
Re:Government involvement (Score:2)
solar energy. (Score:5, Insightful)
How much did having the solar panels on the home add to the price of an already expesive home? How much will the 17% save over the life of the home?
Are electric rates in Japan like they are here? 17% of my last electric bill (mind you, it's the summer and I have the A/C on at least 8 hours a day and a box fan in the bedroom on at least 10 hours a day) is $4.20 (granted my apt. is 720 sq. ft. instead of 1100).
Re:solar energy. (Score:2, Informative)
and assuming that the electricity bill in Yoshikawa would resemble that of their old apartment in Tokyo, it looks like they could be saving about $85/month (~$1K
much better, cheaper ways to save energy (Score:2)
Plus, they greatly reduce fire risk, termite risk, and wind damage risk.
Now, if you combine solar with ICF, you end up with a house that would require very little power from the grid.
Re:solar energy. (Score:5, Interesting)
Cost not the issue (Score:5, Funny)
You're missing the important point here. It's not that solar power is going to save the Japanese a lot of money. They're desperate to ween themselves off nuclear power using any means necessary. After all, if you had to contend with these three [godzilla.co.jp] smashing your reactors on a yearly basis, wouldn't you be damn anxious to do something -- anything -- to stop relying on nuclear power?
GMD
International Power Cables (Score:4, Insightful)
While it would rock to have clean energy finally adopted... Carting it across long distances still sucks.
Gimme Wind, Gimme Solar, hell, I'll even take Geothermal, just make it clean, unobtrusive, and if you'd like, I can sell you some good land in my back yard. *me mutters about pretentions NIMBY asses*
*snicker* (Score:4, Funny)
"Solah Powah Towahs!"
*smile*
Lines to the Nations? (Score:4, Insightful)
Availability of methods isn't slowing down alternative fule sources; people just see no reason to invest the necessary capital to change over, when burning dead dinosaurs is working quite happily.
Re:Lines to the Nations? (Score:2)
Re:Lines to the Nations? (Score:2)
Which is why I don't really care about "conserving" gasoline. The gasoline-consuming cars I buy from now on will have decent pollution controls in them. The quicker we use up the dead dinosaurs, the quicker the renewable energy and clean energy sources become cost effective to use.
Solar power tower? (Score:2, Funny)
solar and wind power is viable right now (Score:5, Interesting)
If a normal neighborhood had 2 stationary panels on each home's roof pointed south that backfed to the utility power and they did the storage, it could be a reality right now.
but it's easier to keep that 1929 Coal plant running and those power commisioners that have no fricking clue or care outside their pocket or circle of power than to change to current technology.
Anyone here can easily reduce their power consumption to 1/10th of what they use now. Couple that with a city wide solar network with some wind plants like in Macinaw city or out west and you can easily have clean power.
it's changing government, and the wasteful companies (running 1500 horse power pumps from 1955-1957 instead of buying noew high efficency pumps) that will be nearly impossible...
Changing to non polluting power will be more difficult than getting bill gates to embrace and use linux.
so how about let's (Score:3, Funny)
Umm... wait. Nevermind. Don't think of that.
Big house (Score:5, Interesting)
Now account for clouds and dirty cells. Unless you clean the cells every few days and pressure wash them biweekly, better increase the square meters of solar cells another 50%. So, thats 60-80 square meters of cell/house..
Now the next question. Where do you store all the energy you'll use at night? If you don't store it, where does it come from? Fancy burying a few ton flywheel in your backyard? How about aa closet filled with lead and sulpheric acid batteries? If you're going to use hydrogen to store it, better double or triple the square meters of solar cell for those inefficiencies.
The same problem applies to 'Solar 2'. You need about 1000 of them to equal the average energy of a nuclear power plant. And another 299000 to equal the mean energy used by the US. To replace all energy used in the US requires about a million Solar 2's.
Re:Big house (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:solar and wind power is viable right now (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, even washing machines are now being sold based on being low-power. We're on our way.
It's true that more homeowners should be thinking about solar and/or wind, but that's more easily said than done in this time whe
Re:solar and wind power is viable right now (Score:3, Insightful)
That might work in some areas of the country... it certainly won't work worth a damn in any area of the country that experiences hail or severe winds (like, oh say, virtually the entire southeastern US). Hail utterly destroys solar panels, and it'll happen often enough that it'll ruin your cost return on them. High winds tend to caus
wind is viable; solar not yet (Score:3, Informative)
Someone help me with the maths (Score:2)
I suppose that we can build solar panels for significantly cheaper if we are going to cover a whole desert with them. Training
Retro (Score:5, Insightful)
Australia is building big convection towers. They are just a big (big!) greenhouse sloping up in the center, so the hot air runs up what amounts to a chimney there, and drives a big windmill -- really, a bunch of them -- in the chimney. It has only a few moving parts, and is easy to build with mature technology.
Simple might not help employ physicists, but it's the right way to build.
Re:Retro (Score:4, Insightful)
As for the simplicity, you're saying that a humongous enclosure and a kilometer-high chimney (I'm sure you build those in your back yard all the time) is somehow simpler than a bunch of swivelling mirrors? And that gearing a fan to handle spikes and drops and still efficiently work as a turbine is easier than just pumping hot sat through a boiler?
Finally, "retro" means "we've done this before, we know what we're doing."
Bad idea. (Score:2, Funny)
How short our memories are.. When we get all that solar power the machines will start a war. We'll have to destroy the skies and move the survivors underground to Zion.
Line Loss (Score:2, Interesting)
The government's solar power tower site (Score:2, Informative)
forgive me if i am wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
i think those sunny countries would rather exist than become giant solar panel farm fields for wasteful cloudy northerners
current power demands versus current solar technology efficiency: wouldn't that necessitate something like covering the whole sahara desert with solar panels?
nevermind the gargantuan investment in time and money to build the infrastructure to set this up... and wouldn't covering vast areas of the earth in solar panels have it's own environmental down side?
i mean, don't get me wrong, hydro/ wind/ solar is wonderful, but isn't the power output from these technolgies miniscule compared to burning hydrocarbons, as environmentally unfriendly as that is?
we need fusion man, pronto. i want my mr. fusion damnit!
Re:forgive me if i am wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's assume we want to provide all of the world's energy needs by solar power. If I recall correctly, the world currently uses about 500 exajoules of primary energy per year, or about 16 terawatts. The sun provides about 1000 watts/m^2 at our distance. However, the overall system efficiency would be somewhere around 1% of that (say 20% solar cell efficiency, 75% loss from night/day/latitude geometry , 40% weather loss, 70% storage conversion and transmission loss). That gives 10W/m^2 average output, so we need 1.6 million square kilometers, about the size of Alaska.
That sounds bad, but it's actually only 0.3% of the earth's surface area. I would guess that the best way to implement that much collector would be to develop plastic based collectors in huge sheets that are floated on the oceans. Convert the energy to hydrogen on site and pipe it to the consuming countries. By eliminating fossil fuel usage, you free up huge sources of raw materials to make all of that plastic.
You could argue that that much area would screw with the earth's climate by changing reflectivity. However, at least it's not generating a layer of greenhouse insulator. Moreover, current agriculture practices alter the reflectivity of a much larger percentage of the earth's surface.
(Don't bother replying to suggest outer space collectors. Say they were 30X more efficient than earth-based systems. Nobody's going to launch satellites with a surface area 3% the size of Alaska. We've been trying to put up a space station the size of my back yard for 20 years now, and still haven't finished.)
Leave the enviropolitics out (Score:5, Insightful)
Also buried in the article is the fact that this rig is so freakin' expensive to set up and so uneconomic to run, that only nations with massive subsidy programs are the ones looking at it. They are targeting Spain because they signed Kyoto and so the government (read taxpayer) is willing to underwrite the whole thing.
So, who wants to take bets on how long before environmentalists scream that we are destroying the planet by planting hundreds of thousands of square miles of mirrors across the Southwestern desert?
Have they figured in the cost of replacing sandblasted mirrors and the cost of trucking water in to clean the mirrors?
the missing concept (Score:2)
The major problem with solar power is that it isn't economical to buy a solar power system: the cost of the solar cells, inverters, and batteries is too much compared to what the power company would cha
Interesting technology (Score:2)
A system like this could really help equatorial regions that get lots of sunshine, and they wouldnt have nasty environmental damage... but places like Canada (ie where I'm writing from) which receive less sunlight in the winter would find it more difficult to implement this system (ie lower returns).
OR you could just do wa
I alway wondered (Score:2, Funny)
Of course, burning up airplanes wouldn't work well at night.
Australian solar tower sounds better (Score:4, Informative)
Powersats are a better idea (Score:3)
Brian
It Total Annhiliation can do it... (Score:2)
Fat guy with a white cat... (Score:3, Funny)
Solar Power in OuterSpace (Score:2)
One other thing... (Score:2)
The primary goal is to show that New York doesn't need [closeindianpoint.org] the 2,000Mw of energy that is generated by I
Orbital Solar Power Stations are the way to go... (Score:3, Funny)
--Home on Lagrange (The L5 Song)
(c) 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm
GREAT resource for Solar, Wind, Water (Score:3, Informative)
Possibly the best do it yourselfer magazine I have ever read is dedicated to renewable energy and guerrilla solar.
Home Power Magazine [homepower.com]
INEXPENSIVE power storage? (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is not and never has been generating the power, the problem is storing the power. The power companies barely buy power from individuals; It costs several thousand dollars for the required hardware, and even then they pay you much less than you pay them for power.
So, how do I cheaply, safely, and non-annoyingly store electrical energy (in some form) and how do I get it back to being usable electrical power later? It's trivial to build wind generators using automotive generators, and build solar panels out of broken solar cells, and for that matter to build your own gas generators using alternators. They kick out 12V which is useful on its own, and you can always use inverters to spit out 110VAC or what have you.
If you get slightly more uppity you can build your own three phase alternators and use them to drive three phase motors, which are commonly used in machine shop equipment.
A good site for home setups (Score:3, Informative)
Screw this (Score:3, Interesting)
A little reality (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see. The article talks about 200 MW plant. At 1kW/m^2 and 17% efficiency this means we need about 300 acres of mirrors. Seems real practical.
We're doing it in CA... (Score:5, Interesting)
For 7K out of pocket (after tax credits, rebates, etc.), I can get a 2KW solar panel system with grid tie installed. This would give me, conservatively, about 496 KW hours a month in production. This would cut my usage by 2/3s. For 12K out of pocket, I can get a 3KW system which would give me about 720 KW hours a month in production and would completely clear my needs.
With a grid tie system, I run my meter backwards when my production is greater than my demand. This means that any electricity that I generate is credited against my bill at the rate in play (I believe you also get peak pricing withi this setup) at the time I generate it.
Bottom line, is that for a 12K investment, I can clear an average bill of $150 a month. This means that in a little over 6 1/2 years I have paid off the system. Or you can think of this as giving me an annual return of 12.5% on my initial investment. That is pretty damn good!
Re:We're doing it in CA... (Score:3, Interesting)
Amorphous panels produce enough power to offset the energy what was required to produce them in 4 years. It's less than 6 years for polycrystalline modules and 10 years for most monocrystalline solar modules. Nearly 100% of the terrestrial solar panels put into use in the late 70's/early 80's are sti
Re:We're doing it in CA... (Score:3, Interesting)
The incremental MWs required at that point are VERY expensive. More expensive than a solar power system. And of course, when things are running at peak demand is when I get peak output out of my syste
Too late (Score:3, Insightful)
But of course it is all far too late. If realistic [princeton.edu] predictions [mines.edu] are anything to go by, world oil production will peak in the next decade and then begin to fall at about 2 percent per year soon afterwards. Even if the US started building wind turbines (the most promising renewable energy source) at a rate of 20,000 a year right now, there would still be major problems. As it is, it looks like everyone is going to carry on as usual until the energy shortages begin, at which point there will not be enough spare energy available to undertake a massive renewable energy building program. Given that more than 4 billion of the worlds 6 billion people are only alive because of the energy subsidy of fossil fuels, which allows chemical fertilizers and mechanised agriculture, the resulting resource wars and famines are likely to be very bad.
Damn nitpicking geeks... (Score:3, Interesting)
STORAGE
That is, the plant they describe makes it possible to generate electricity any time, day or night, rain or shine. The only limit is that you can't run more than 13 hours without sun at one go.
This means you can throttle it up and down according to need like a real power plant.
According to their numbers (which aren't explained, but I assume are based on the 4 years they've been running the prototype plant) they can produce at $.05/kWh, which is below the retail price of electricity in the US, and probably much cheaper than in oil-hungry places like Japan. Also, since those costs are largely (wholly local) construction, land, and maintenance, sunny countries with low labor costs and some desert (India, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, etc.) would realize an even better price.
Then there are circumstances they don't mention working in their favor, like:
World oil production is levelling off and may decrease if more easy reserves aren't found.
Natural gas supplies aren't as plentiful as hoped.
No one is building power plants at anything like the rate needed to keep up with demand, and
Nuclear is still politically untouchable.
Throw it all together, and a new plant that can produce at that price is a steal.
Now, if they could float the mirrors around an offshore platform, even the land costs would disappear...
Re:Superman IV (Score:2)
Technically, if you read it correctly...he's not really even tough skinned so much as that solar energy creates a barrier around him that protects him.
There are issues that are supposed to take place in the future where Enviornmental damage has done so much to the atmosphere, Superman can really only leap great di
Re:South Pole (Score:4, Informative)
Sure but it would suck.
The reason its so cold there is because what sunlight hits does so at an extreme angle.
Its hot at the equator because the sun is beaming straight down.
A square foot of ground in Mexico gets an order of magnitude more light energy hitting it than a square foot in antarctica.
Besides, it's pitch black 6 months of the year at either pole.
Re:NO WAR FOR SOLAR POWER!!! (Score:2)
But so far, sounds like Boeing has a couple for the receiver and that's it...but rest assured...it'll happen.
Or like you say - we'll go to war.
RB
Re:If they don't want thier sun.. seattle wants it (Score:3, Funny)
Yes we can, it take a really big parabolic mirror... but we will have to test the focus first on a city in your state... will Redmond do as a test target?
This post brough to you by the Linux for solar mirrors of doom in space council...
Re:Well... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Stick 'em on the moon! (Score:3, Informative)
You could put the panels on the side we can't see on earth and bounce the power off an extra satellite.
The real problem with this to that you either need to
A) Build the panels on earth and transport them to the moon (which is insanely expensive), or
b) Build the solar panels on the moon with lunar materials