Solar energy collected in space and beamed back to Earth by laser could soon be used to power homes and electric vehicles under a project by European space engineers.
It sounds more like a scheme dreamed up by a James Bond villain attempting to destroy the Earth than a technology that could help provide a solution to the planet’s dwindling energy supplies.
Engineers plan to put satellites into orbit around the planet that can gather energy from the sun, concentrate it into powerful laser beams and transmit the energy back to the Earth where it can be used to generate electricity.
While harvesting solar energy in space has been discussed by scientists for more than 30 years, engineers at EADS Astrium, Europe’s largest space company, now believe the technology is available to allow them to start building a working prototype.
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And it will be how many years before some “study” show’s that the laser is harming …..
Beam me up Scotty.
Actually I can imagine some reasons why it would theoretically add heat to the Earth:
1) The energy collected in space would be energy that would have bypassed the Earth and would then be collected and beamed back to Earth where it would do work.
2) The only true neutral energy is the collecting and redistribution of energy already in the system like solar ( ground based ), hydroelectric, wind power, tidal etc …… i.e. or anything else that uses energy already radiating from source to source. When we use this kind of energy source the sum total of energy it the same as if we had not done anything to collect it. We are merely concentrating it in a for to do useful work after which it just dissipates keeping the average heat of the planet the same as if we hadn’t collected it.
3) Any energy that is normally unavailable that is locked up in chemical reactions, nuclear reactions or extracted from deep in the Earth ( geothermal energy, theoretically already in the system but released into the atmosphere more quickly than it would naturally could create an atmospheric heating greater than normal energy radiating from the Earth’s crust of mantle ).
But how significant this energy in theoretical Global warming would depend a great deal on the scale of use: I suspect that below a certain level the Earth would radiate away a lot of this extra energy ? Oh, and if we where going into an Ice Age this extra heat could save our bacon …. LOL.