Europe

1551 readers

564 users here now

News and information from Europe 🇪🇺

(Current banner: La Mancha, Spain. Feel free to post submissions for banner images.)

Rules (2024-08-30)

This is an English-language community. Comments should be in English. Posts can link to non-English news sources when providing a full-text translation in the post description. Automated translations are fine, as long as they don't overly distort the content.
No links to misinformation or commercial advertising. When you post outdated/historic articles, add the year of publication to the post title. Infographics must include a source and a year of creation; if possible, also provide a link to the source.
Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. Don't post direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments. Don't troll nor incite hatred. Don't look for novel argumentation strategies at Wikipedia's List of fallacies.
No bigotry, sexism, racism, antisemitism, dehumanization of minorities, or glorification of National Socialism.
Be the signal, not the noise: Strive to post insightful comments. Add "/s" when you're being sarcastic (and don't use it to break rule no. 3).
If you link to paywalled information, please provide also a link to a freely available archived version. Alternatively, try to find a different source.
Light-hearted content, memes, and posts about your European everyday belong in !yurop@lemm.ee. (They're cool, you should subscribe there too!)
Don't evade bans. If we notice ban evasion, that will result in a permanent ban for all the accounts we can associate with you.
No posts linking to speculative reporting about ongoing events with unclear backgrounds. Please wait at least 12 hours. (E.g., do not post breathless reporting on an ongoing terror attack.)

(This list may get expanded when necessary.)

We will use some leeway to decide whether to remove a comment.

If need be, there are also bans: 3 days for lighter offenses, 14 days for bigger offenses, and permanent bans for people who don't show any willingness to participate productively. If we think the ban reason is obvious, we may not specifically write to you.

If you want to protest a removal or ban, feel free to write privately to the mods: @federalreverse@feddit.org, @poVoq@slrpnk.net, or @anzo@programming.dev.

founded 4 months ago

MODERATORS

federalreverse

poVoq@slrpnk.net

anzo@programming.dev

Iceland Could Become First Nation To Get Solar Power From Space In 2030 (www.iflscience.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by 0x815 to c/europe

20 comments fedilink hide all child comments

UK-based company Space Solar is partnering with Reykjavik Energy and Icelandic sustainability initiative Transition Labs to develop a space-based solar power plant that can deliver about 30 megawatts of electricity – potentially enough to power between 1,500 and 3,000 homes – from 2030. The system will collect sunlight in space through solar panels and then transmit it as radio waves at a specific frequency to a ground station, where it will be converted to electricity for the grid.

The satellite is expected to be scalable and quite big. Even if a full version of their CASSIOPeiA power array is not built, we are talking about the heaviest single object in space that is not a space station, and when all the arrays are splayed out, much larger than the International Space Station.

The company aims to have a scaled-up version of the system in space by 2036, which would supply gigawatts of electricity.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Question, if electricity can be transmitted as a radio signal, why could we generate power here on earth in areas where renewables are super abundant (turbines in the ocean, giant waterfalls, deserts for solar, et cetera) and transmit that around the earth to areas where it's needed? Why does it have to be in space for this to work?

Also, can someone please explain how the fuck we wirelessly transmit electricity, and how it's different from the Tesla thing?

[–] Felix_Bardner@pawb.social 3 points 2 weeks ago

Think of transmitting power using a lightbulb and a solar panel. The tesla method was beaming its power in all directions, like a lightbulb, so a solar panel placed elsewhere would only be catching a tiny amount of the transmitted power. Very inefficient. So instead, we use something more like a laser- we get a collumnated beam of energy we can send straight to our panel, which is much less wasteful. Of course, actually using a laser and a solar panel aren't ideal because they're both pretty inefficient, so we use a lower frequency we can work with more efficiently, like microwaves. We still incur some heavy losses doing this though. This also explains why we don't beam power away from areas with plentiful renewables, line losses in normal grids makes exporting energy to somewhere across the globe infeasible, and the costs of enough space infrastructure to beam power around are way higher than the low return you'd be able to get by converting energy to microwaves and back twice. In fact, the inefficiencies from this process are bad enough that it already makes space based solar economically challenging. Maybe when starship becomes operational and launch costs drop another order of magnitude, it'll be viable, but until then I think our photovoltiacs are better placed on the ground.

load more comments (1 replies)