What is the solar intensity at lunar poles?

From: "victoriatangoman"
To:
Sent: Monday, February 04, 2002 10:21 PM
Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: What is the solar intensity at lunar poles?

[snikt]
> I'm sure the engineers have already figured out, from different
> scenarios of course, how to prevent the cables that are coming from
> the back of the solar arrays from winding up as the solar array
> continues its motion around the track, month after month. I could
> imagine a solution being not having cables, and transmitting the
> energy to a receiver, which in turn could transmit it through
> cables. But this entails conversion loss.
>

I think that you could the track itself to conduct the energy, thus avoiding
the problem of cables winding up. I think that there are electric trains
that get their energy that way, and I am sure that there are trains with
power supply coming from "antennas" touching a cable suspended above the
track (the metro train in my city operates that way).

[snikt]
> Anyways, to transmit the energy to the equatorial launch base, would
> require transmitting it over a distance of 2600 miles. Over that
> distance an AC system, even with massive transformers along the way,
> would entail significant losses, so it seems that a High Voltage
> Direct Current transmission system is the most feasable. These
> systems are becoming more prevalent these days, in fact, there is
> quite a large one operating from a BIG dam in Brazil that transmits
> power to Argentina and Paraguay. Now, these systems are usually more
> expensive because they require a converter to change the AC to DC at
> the generating source, and then again at the destination.
[snikt]

It is Itaipu, THE largest dam in the world (www.itaipu.gov.br). By the way,
Paraguay and Argentina are relatively small countries and are very close to
Itaipu (the dam is located at the Brazil-Paraguay border), and so
transmission lines for those locations are not that impressive. On the other
hand, Brazil is about the size of the United States and the power-hungry
spots are far way from most of the major power plants (almost all of them
hydro), and so there are indeed extremely long power lines *inside* the
Brazilian territory. For instance, as far as I know there is a 800 Km-long
line connecting Itaipu to So Paulo state (the one more densely populated
and more heavily industrialized). And, in the year 2000 alone, three new
lines adding up 3,600 Km were built - data from the site of the (Brazilian)
National Agency of Electrical Energy (www.aneel.gov.br). So, based on
experience gathered with power lines on Earth, building a transmission line
2,600 Km (not miles...) connecting the lunar equator to one of the poles
does not seems to be a task beyond our current electrical engineering.
Actually, maybe it would even be trivial with not by the exotic
environmental conditions of the Moon.

Lucio de Souza Coelho