Power Lines to the Moon - I kid you not !

Yes it is sad, they are presenting the same wrong arguments which have
been debunked many times on this list.

For the heck of it I suppose I could go over them again, although I am
obviously preaching to the choir here.

> What is worrying is that they are presenting themselves as an
> authority
> on Renewable Energy.

They are look fairly typical of many greenish sites and orgs.

>
> Perhaps if we all email them they will put some correct information
> under this section instead of fairytales.
>

Any volunteers ? I am afraid I have done battle with greenies so many
times that I am suffering from burnout and not particalrly interested in
starting another slugfest.

>
> > Why don't we build a solar plant on the moon and beam the energy
> > back to Earth?
> >

GEO would be a better place than the surface of the Moon IMHO, but
opinions differ amongst experts, and there are some pros and cons to
each.

>
> > We don't do this for the same reason we don't cover North Dakota
> > with wind turbines to supply the whole country with electricity;
> > transmission costs. Disregarding the insanely expensive cost of
> > building a solar plant on the moon, transmitting this energy back
>

Nonsense of course. We do not cover ND with wind turbines because
fossil fuels are so cheap, and it is much cheaper to build fossil fuel
plants near to the electricity consumers. Conventional transmission
costs on Earth are high because they increase with distance ( $X million
dollars per mile per amp) but with SPS rectennas can be put anywhere,
and the cost of the teansmission does nto scale with distance.

The authors of this wevsite did not address microwave power beaming at
all, so they have set up a strawman (cables to the Moon, ahaha) which is
trvially easy to shoot down. This is dishonest approach, aka deceptive
advertising. Sadly I see this kind of thing a lot in greenie world, and
even closer to home. People are pushing a personal agenda, and so
presented distored half truths to support their case.

Oh well. Fortunately some of here can see through that stuff.

> > would be technically impossible. In addition, with the rotation of
> > the moon and the earth as they are, the transmission cables would
> > quickly become terribly tangled.
> >

Gasp, I never thought of that, wow, I guess that pretty much kills the
whole notion of bringing power down from space.

Actually, power tower using stabilized tethers are feasible, but the
tether is for stabilization, not for transmission. Microwave power
beaming is better.

>
> > "Beaming" electricity is not quite the same as beaming Scotty up to
> > the Enterprise. Electricity travels along transmission cables that
> > are inefficient and very expensive: high voltage cables can cost
> > thousands of dollars per mile. [42] If we could devise a way to
> > efficiently "beam" electricity without transmission cables, we would
>
> > be utilizing this technology first to connect earthbound power
> > plants with various earthbound consumers.
> >

Jay has already responded to this. There are some real technical;
problems, beamed power does not scale down well because of antenna
diffraction limits. It is only useful for gigawatt sized systems.
That is the reason why it is not widely used for Earth plants. But
there are actually some experimetnal power beaming projects on Earth,
e.g. Reunion Island amd somewhere else I forget where, possibly Japan.

>
> > Perhaps a better idea would be to build solar plants on the earth
> > and then just keep the energy here. It is true that the sunlight on
> > the moon's surface can be more intense than on the earth's surface,
> > due to its lack of atmosphere, but this greater intensity does not

And the other reasons, 24/7 solar collection in space, whereas
terrestrial collectors on get power about 10% of the total time averaged
over a year. Plus the difficulty sterring arrays on Earth, it is
easier in space. And a space power system can use beam switching to
feed different cities/countries as diurnal load varies.

Terrestrial power is not presently widespread on Earth or in space
because of the cheap price of fossil fuels.

>
> > justify the R&D effort that would be required to pursue extra-
> > terrestrial capture of solar energy for use on earth. Furthermore
> > since most industrialized countries experience power losses of about
>
> > 10% between the generating plant and the customer, which is only at
> > most in the hundreds of kilometers, there is no way the energy would
>
> > be still coursing through the transmission cables after the 384,400
> > kilometers it would have to travel from the moon to the earth. [43]
> > [44]
> >

There is that strawman again.

They have reverted to assuming cables would be used.

Cheers,

Charles R.