Collecting Solar Energy in Space and Beaming It To Earth

I notice periodic comments and guest blogs on the prospect of beaming energy from space; linked here is one that went up today.

I feel I should point out that this will never happen.  Why?  Because it doesn’t need to happen.  At all times during the day and night, 6000 times more power from the sun is directly incident on the Earth than all of us are consuming. Even if our population’s appetite for energy doubles, which is indeed likely, we still need a solution that captures only 1/3000 of the solar energy we’re receiving, and that’s discounting all other forms of renewable/clean energy, developed now and into the future.

Given that, we need to ask ourselves which sounds more practical:

• Collecting solar energy on space stations or the moon and beaming it to Earth, or

• Creating collectors of whatever size necessary here on the planet.  Keep in mind that these “solar” collectors take many forms: PV panels, CSP reflectors, wind turbines, run of river generator turbines, and biofuels processing plants; these are simply different flavors of solar energy.  Then we have forms of renewable energy that aren’t rooted in the sun at all, e.g., tidal and geothermal–and on top of that, we need to consider the possibility that clean and safe types of nuclear energy will be developed, the most prominent possibility of which is thorium (though that’s just one of many).

So which of the above two bullet points is more practical?  Obviously, for the foreseeable future, the answer is the latter.

But what about the “unforeseeable” future?  What if, by some good fortune, we still have a civilization here in 100 years?  Well, recognize the magnitude of the impact of a full century, given the rate of change–and the ever-accelerating rate of change–in our ability to develop new technologies.  Among other things, 100 years will bring us space exploration/migration, an understanding of dark energy, and Lord knows what else. All bets are off.

But even when all bets are off, it’s still hard to see the value of beaming energy to Earth from space.