Renewable Energy ~ Just Past The Magnetosphere
Hello world, I’m almost through with my Master’s! I only have one class and my project left, though I’m still working out the details of how I’ll finish it up. Almost done!
I had a thought that I can’t let slip, and it involves energy. The current source of our energy is one of a collection of huge issues we’re dealing with today. Most of the popular solutions for renewable energy involve either drilling for more oil or experimenting with different chemicals to generate non-oil-based combustion. At heart, I think these solutions are short-sighted. They both involve depleting limited resources of the Earth, and I think they won’t suffice as our global energy demands increase. The future 2.0 will pull amps! Lets face it.
Specifically, we need electricity. Electricity is the life-blood of today’s society of devices.
If we can get a sustainable way to stream electricity without depleting Earth’s resources, we’d be set for quite a while; much longer than we’ll be with combustibles.
Though plans unfortunately call for turning drills down to dig through the crust for expendable oil. My question is, why not turn up? Just look at the sun. It might sound as if I’m about to push the use of solar panels, but I think we can actually do better.
The sun embodies energy - light, electricity, and a lot of other useful physical phenomena. Plants are the masters of transforming light-energy into electricity, but in our efforts to emulate them, we’ve hit limitations preventing our efficient conversion of solar light-energy into the amounts of electricity necessary for society. Slow pace in material-science discoveries, inefficiencies in photovoltaic processes, and occlusion (from clouds and such) are issues hard to solve.
But as humans, we have advantage over plants - we’re mobile! So why don’t we bypass the light-to-electricity conversion? I think we can tap into the electricity stream of the sun, directly. Remember, the sun streams solar wind.
This is a constant shower of charged particles flowing from the sun outward, in all directions through our solar system. In fact, if not for the magnetic field of Earth, the solar wind would radiate all parts of the earth’s surface with ionic particles. Energy abounds in this particle storm. If the particles are ionic, then they have charge.
Charge means electricity. And this electric wind isn’t too far away. It blows just past the boundary of the Earth’s magnetosphere. Traces of it actually leak into the ionosphere. A recent study found evidence for a direct link between the sun’s solar wind and our ionosphere:
See here: Strange Portal Connects Earth to Sun
That’s actually why it’s ionic! Have you seen the Aurora Borealis?
There it is! It’s but a glimmer of the solar wind, it’s right in front of us, and it’s power. But the question is, can we get that power down to earth?
I think it’s doable, and I have an idea to test it out that might help to advance a different effort involving space travel, so here’s my idea. Several groups in the world are currently working to find materials that will allow them to construct what’s known as a “space elevator.” The idea behind it is to construct a cord stretching from the ground into space. If the space-end of the cord is weighted, the spin of the earth will theoretically hold it taught with centripetal force. Once taught, the theory goes that an elevator can be attached to the cord, offering a cheap and easy ride into space. One group performed some experiments and realized that a vertically extended tether actually experiences a charge as it encounters upper parts of the atmosphere.
So elevators might be too tricky. But I say, take the space elevator idea, lose the elevator, then extend the tether. Extend it just past the magnetosphere. Have it touch the raw solar wind. What happens then?
I’m predicting … Space Power Cord!
Plug the ground end into a power plant, then maybe we’d be saying hello to clean, space-born renewable electricity.
Of course, there’s thousands of further questions. How much electricity will we get? Will it work at all? If it does, will the electricity just trickle in, or will it overpower our current resistance and voltage regulation technology? Will it fluctuate too wildly to design control systems around? Many questions remain, but now they are questions of managing an unlimited resource. The current energy investigations involve questions about managing rapidly-depleting resources, and it will be a short matter of time before we’re in a resource addiction rut once again. The Space Power Cord offers less to think and worry about, and the technology to get these tethers up there isn’t too far off.
SpaceShipTwos and/or Armadillo Aerospace pods will be flying by 2011. So why not get some tether on the back of one and test this out?
Update: I should bring to light some obvious issues of a tether in space, and offer some alternatives. E.g. what if it falls down via unexpected forces (stray meteorites, space junk, aliens, deadly missiles, etc)?
Well, there is a simpler way to test this. If the solar wind is, in fact, giving the ionosphere its healthy ionized state, it may very well be that we’d only need to transmit electricity from the upper atmosphere down to earth to get this renewable flow going. But how do we tap it? Space elevators? They still look to be a ways off, so it’s more feasible to try this out by hanging cord off a high flying geostationary craft such as an Armadillo pod or high-altitude balloon to try out. The balloon is the most cheap and realistic option.
But even if tethers are a no-go, maybe the energy of the ionosphere can be transferred to ground without cords. I remember, not very long ago, some research experimenting with a powerful ionizing laser. The researchers would shoot it into the air to ionize the atmospheric particles along its pathway. This ionized path would trigger the flow of electricity - as lightning. The goal: removing energy from clouds to reduce the effect of lightning storms.
So it may be as simple as designing the laser a little stronger, then designing an efficient way to “catch” whatever comes out the bottom of the ionized path created by it …
It seems that the laser road is imperfect as well, but the point is, options exist.
I’d ideally still prefer a solution that doesn’t at all touch the earth’s atmosphere. Who knows what might happen if we start robbing the ionosphere of its charge at a rate faster than it might be renewed…Though I think it warrants investigation. Just … wear helmets 
Update 2: It appears I’m not the only one thinking about this!
See this link:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/23/opinion/23smith.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
The solution mentioned in this article is nice in that it relies on outer-atmosphere collection. My worry with it is the use of solar panels and the “beaming” of energy that they speak of. The panels still waste energy in the photovoltaic conversion process, and the “beam,” well…As a friend of mine recently recalled, Sim City 2000 had a city-crisis scenario involving a space energy beamer accidentally missing target and laying waste to a nice portion of the player’s city. The preconditions here sound terrifyingly similar…
If we could somehow move energy from one spot to another across a distance like this, safely, it seems to me that a whole host of current energy issues can vanish. I have an idea about this, but I’ve rambled enough, so I’ll save it for … the future =)