Japanese Firm Proposes Microwave-Linked Solar Plant On the Moon 330
littlesparkvt writes "Harnessing the sun's power is nothing new on Earth, but if a Japanese company has its way, it will build a solar strip across the 11,000 mile Lunar equator that could supply our world with clean and unlimited solar energy for generations." Some of the company's other projects look just as ambitious.
is that really better than earth based? (Score:5, Insightful)
Solar insolation on the moon is not dramatically higher than on Earth - around 1400 W/m^2 versus around 1000 W/m^2 on Earth. Granted, a Lunar solar station wouldn't be affected by weather, but Earth based receivers will suffer from efficiency loss during bad weather.
Could they achieve the same result by building a bit larger system on earth, but without the hundreds (or thousands?) of rocket launches it would take to get the materials to the moon to get the thing started?
Besides, who wants to see a big black ribbon around the moon?
Re:I think I've seen this plan (Score:5, Insightful)
They would collect twice the energy if they were placed in orbit.
Why? They would be outside the atmosphere in both scenarios.
The 11000 KM in the article referred to the circumference of the moon. The (harebrained) scheme postulates
putting the photoarray entirely around the moon at its equator (on the surface).
Only half of that circumference is facing the sun at any given time.
Only about 2/3s of that half would have anything near an optimal angle to the sun.
By placing steerable arrays in earth orbit, you gain the ability to keep ALL of them always angle toward the sun.
Re:piotr (Score:4, Insightful)
On ISS, they get about 0.1 mw from an acre, that is 24.7 mw from km2.
Pedantic remark: There is a slight difference between a mW (milliwatt) and a MW (megawatt), a factor of about a short billion, or 9 (decimal) orders of magnitude.
Even more pedantic: W is upper case (as it's named after James Watt). I'm not aware of any unit using a lower case "w" as the abbreviation. But in general, capitalisation is significant for units.