Can someone explain to me why it makes more sense to put large, complex pieces of equipment in space where maintaining it is costly, and then beam power though the atmosphere, as opposed to putting simple, easily maintainable tech on the ground, with the input radiation already having traverse the atmosphere? Is there such an advantage power wise that this is worth doing?
Just a shockingly bad idea... Europe has phenomenally dollar potential already, on the ground, and what it couldn't get there it could much more easily compensate for with arrays in countries to it's south.
God forbid it might have to work with other countries for some of it's energy. It's already doing that and would absolutely need to do that to ever be able to build this project anyways
Europe isn't actually getting series about that. This is mostly just talk.<p>Europe is neither willing to invest in the rocket technology to make this happen nor has committed to financing of the solar based power or the necessary ground system.<p>And beyond space based solar is mostly a really bad idea anyway.<p>But I guess some people in Europe and specially Germany are willing to finance anything other then nuclear.
I would be curious to know why no one has ever tried to put large solar power plants in the Sahara desert. Covering large parts of uninhabited land with photovoltaic arrays and transporting the electricity to Europe via power lines and submarine cables seems to me easier than launch massive solar arrays into space and beam down the power. I know that many countries in that area are politically unstable, but I guess it is possible to find at least one of them whose government is able to guarantee the security of the power plants upon payment of royalties.
Nah. It will spend money on very very expensive feasibility studies, carried out either by some obscure government tender hungry firms, or some large know fuck all consultancy and then nothing will happen. “Europe”, simply isnt capable of large scale projects.