Cloud burn-through power

[Aero]

Here is an off the wall idea/question.

Its snowing, about 32 degrees F, but the cloud layer is thin. If I had a microwave transmitter system, how would I tune and focus it to burn a hole in the clouds so the sun could shine through and melt my snow?

Or, if I had a solar farm, say 40 acres of flat panels at 25 % efficiency, could it generate enough extra electricity to pay for the power to burn the hole through the clouds? Oh, yea, I'm at 42 degrees north latitude.

Just an idle question while waiting for talk-polywell members to get back from holiday.

[drmike]

That's a funny one! Since the snow doesn't move, but the clouds do, pointing the microwave at the snow directly would probably work better and cost less!

One of the cool ideas I liked back in the 1970's was the L5 Society - put a bunch of solar collectors at the L5 point and beam microwave power back to earth. Would have cooked a lot of birds!

But if you combine the solar collector idea with the elevator, you have a nice path for the power without cooking anything. Kinda the opposite of wireless I guess!

[Aero]

Yes, I'm sure I could melt the snow with microwaves, and clouds do move. Unfortunately this snow storm has been hanging around. If there was a wind to blow the clouds away, I could just wait. As it is I just need to off-set my pointing angle a little up wind. With a hole in the clouds it will stop snowing and the sun will shine through melting the snow, and since I like sunshine, I'll be happy.

But lets drop the question about the snow and look at the solar farm.

I was thinking that the microwave frequency could be selected to couple strongly with the water vapor in the clouds using perhaps less energy than the complete solar spectrum to heat them until the sun shines through. Then my solar farm could convert 25% of the sunlight into electricity. Of course the warmed water vapor would rise and re-condense down wind causing more snow on the downwind neighborhood, perhaps annoying them, but this is not a political question, its a technical one.

And as it happens, there are cloudy days in the desert southwest without snow or rain. They do have solar farms though, which work best without the clouds. And they are not hampered by neighbors.

[scareduck]

One of the cool ideas I liked back in the 1970's was the L5 Society - put a bunch of solar collectors at the L5 point and beam microwave power back to earth. Would have cooked a lot of birds!

Back in 1979, there was a humor paperback book published called The 80's: A Look Back at the Tumultuous Decade, written by a large cohort. Some of the authors were well-known then (Stan Lee, George Plimpton), and some would become famous or go on to significant writing and/or entertainment careers (Henry Beard, Harry Shearer, Amy Ephron). They projected a space energy beaming system that inadvertently moved off axis, resulting in an accident that became known as the Cooking of Provincial France.

(Strangely enough, they actually got correct the coming oil glut, but they called it about a decade too soon.)

[JohnSmith]

As I understand it, if you built a wire mesh rectenna over a couple of kilometers, you wouldn't cook very many birds at all, with an efficiency of about 60%. Not perfect, but I think it's the best idea so far.

[Mike Holmes]

Yeah, all we'd need is some efficient way to get the panels into space. Something like a polywell fusion reactor. And then...

Oh, wait... then we wouldn't need the power from space...

It seems to me that the energy used to put such a system into space would make the return on investment on such a system very long in the offing.

Mike

[Aero]

Most of the stories I've read, and I've read a lot, that have space based solar power for on Earth application are situated in a future where the greens have the upper hand. Pollution is basically outlawed. Its not economics that force them into space, rather it's regulation.