It's less about the loss and more about the space required for the receiver and the environmental hazard

Fusion does not exist and wouldn't be in time if we started buildong commercial plants today. Low lead time is the only shot we have.

Space based solar has already been demonstrated, but will not provide substantial power since the receiver is basically a giant solar array and dead zone where life gets toasted.

That’s a real genius plan.

Trivial amounts compared to the solar energy hitting the entire surface of half the Earth.

The problem isn’t incoming energy, it’s outgoing energy. Greenhouse gases reduce the amount of energy radiated back into space and that’s what increases the mean global temperature.

Adding a few hundred square miles of surface area wouldn’t change much.

Pay to win is always the default in corporate world.

A good reminder of the definition of a parasite is it cannot live without a host. These corporations and capitalists can't live without us but we can live without them which makes them a parasite.

This energy would then be transmitted to one or more stations on Earth. It is then converted to electricity and delivered to the energy grid or batteries for storage.

How is the energy transmitted to Earth?

Solar energy gathered in space is less likely to be affected by cloud cover and is safe from natural disasters such as flooding and earthquakes

You don't say. However I suspect that the chance of being hit by a micrometeorite is significantly higher.

Yeah this article is severely lacking in any concrete details.

I'd also like to know how exactly it is that they plan to deploy massive arrays of solar panels to space. Most earth-based solar farms are huge and take up entire fields, some are a few kilometres across in size. That's many orders of magnitude more massive than anything we've previously ever launched.

Plus whatever power transmission system they come up with would have to be powerful to be of any use but if it's that powerful would present an active danger and would effectively constitute a space-based weapon system.

It's a cool sci-fi idea but it is all pie in the sky.

Back of the napkin math:

Largest solar sail (much lighter than panels, but doesn't produce electricity) 2000 sq meters

200w/sq meter

400kwp

Also iirc the space solar farms plans I've seen call for re radiating the energy back via microwaves to dedicated receiving towers on the ground

You could build a circle of satellites on the dawn dusk line, just have them do polar orbits. I think there's such a thing as a solar stationary orbit.

The thing is, 25 years isn't really that far in the future. Not when you count all the lead in time. Firstly you have to invent the microwave power transmission array, that's probably going to take it a decade, and that's been optimistic, then you've somehow got to arrange to launch hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of solar power satellites, then you have to figure out a way for the satellites to transmit the energy to the transmission array, and you have to build the receiving array on earth.

It took them 10 months just to build our companies new building, and it's the most generic thing you've ever seen. How are they going to do all this in 25 years?

So could a fucking Dyson sphere. This article is PopMech-tier speculative trash. A flying car in every driveway, any day now since the 1960s…

Yeah I've seen that. Microwave power beaming would work in theory it's just electromagnetic radiation after all. But the vast majority of it is going to get absorbed by water molecules, because that's what microwave radiation does, that's why it cooks your food.

They're probably going to bake a lot of seagulls as well.

This is an idea from the 1960s back when they thought solar panels would be like computer chips and remain super expensive in terms of area but become exponentially better at the amount of sunlight they could convert into electricity.

It makes absolutely zero sense to spend billions of dollars putting solar panels in space and beaming the power back to earth now that they are so cheap per unit area. The one thing you could argue a space based solar array could do would be to stretch out the day length so you need less storage, but that's easier to accomplish using long electrical cables.

Countries will do everything except build nuclear power plants ig.

Ah yes now we just need a really long wire

We just need an elevator to the stars! With a really long cable

lol, what an insane idea...
A physical cable back to Earth is impossible, otherwise we'd already have space elevators.
Any other wireless transmission would have all the same weather problems and energy losses, it would be WAY cheaper to just build more solar panels on the ground.