Generating Power Using Solar Wind

This will raise your eyebrows and put a question in your mind “Is this really something great?” Indeed it is. Until now researchers have been working on solar power and wind energy separately. What one can think of solar energy is either solar panels or we can say photovoltaic cell or at the max solar boilers to rotate the turbines of a generator and in case of wind energy we can only imagine tall sky touching windmills. But this is completely different from these ideas. If I say that panels for these will be setup in space then this may surprise many. Definitely no turbines are going to rotate in space due to the wind energy.



Let me first tell you about the principle governing this. It is going to use the electrons zooming away from sun. The satellite for this purpose is called a Dyson-Harrop satellite. Freeman Dyson in 1959 explained a concept of encompassing a star by solar power satellites to capture most or all of its energy output. On the same lines Harrop and Schulze-Makuch wrote a paper regarding solar wind power satellites. The concept is to use a long copper wire loop pointing towards Sun that would be positively charged and would trap most of the electrons that make half of the solar wind. These coppers wires produce a cylindrical magnetic field. The snagged electrons are funneled into a receiver that generates electric current. This current is used not only to supply power to earth but also for producing magnetic field around the copper wire and also for transmitting the power to earth via infrared beams.

Important thing is that air is transparent to infrared beams. What we have to look after is focusing the beam at the receivers on earth and avoid loss of energy midway. One of the concerns is that this energy may also get dissipated near earth’s atmosphere in the form of heat.

To estimate the amount of electricity that possibly can be generated we need: 1 cm copper wire, 300m long, a receiver 2 m wide and a sail 10 m in diameter sitting midway between earth and sun can. It can generate 1.7 MW of power. Whereas a 1000m cable with a 8400km sail can generate one billion gigawatts of power.

As a matter of fact this amount is 100 billion times the power earth currently uses. And to our surprise this Dyson-Harrop satellite would cost less than a solar panel project. But practically handling such a large amount of power is still a major question.