They're Making Solar Panels... Work at Night | Reflect Orbital
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- Опубликовано: 4 окт 2024
- Global fossil fuel consumption is roughly 100x greater than the global fossil fuel formation rate.
With that, solar power is the future - it's rapidly getting cheaper and is inexhaustible. But, it only works 50% of the time... during the day.
Reflect Orbital is challenging that by building a fleet of mirror satellites to power solar farms at night in Episode 50 of S³
Startup: www.reflectorb...
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Placing mirrors in space to enhance solar farms is impractical. The mirrors would need to be at least as large as the farms themselves to reflect enough sunlight, making them extremely costly and challenging to deploy and maintain.
Extremely Skeptical... anticipating @Thunderf00t
hahaha, today's the day friend.
This is as legit as Theranos.
Lol😂
solar roadway, but IN SPAAAACEEE 🤣
Great comedy.
I Laughed my balls off watching this.
I feel like they are almost taking the piss
I'm puzzled as well
I really hope so. "A lot of people don't realize that rockets exist" is actually something that he said
They could make some extra money by bending those mirrors little bit to create space death ray for hire.
That will happen, so it might as well be the good guys doing it, not our enemies.
Icarus. Tomorrow never dies
Imagine cooking a small town with that technology
Is this the Jewish space laser?
Optics specialist?
Main problem seems to be the size of the mirror? You can only hit solar panels that are as big as the mirror itself, unless you spread the light out, but then it loses intensity. I like their optimism but it's so hard to see how adding all these moving parts to solar panels could be cost-effective.
It's not complicated. It's just about the cost numbers. That's all it is. Your question is right, and the answer is simple. They'll come up with an answer to that question eventually.
@@bradallen1832the answer is don't do it lmao
what do you mean by "You can only hit solar panels that are as big as the mirror itself" have you never heard of focusing light? Do you think all mirrors are flat? How do you think telescopes work?
@@justincameron9123 you cannot be a real person. of course you can spread out and focus the light. whatever you do, you can't create more energy with a mirror.
@@WaltersWatching Your statement "You can only hit solar panels that are as big as the mirror itself" is factually incorrect. Which might be fine if it was an extension of a previous statement that clarifies or adds further context to what you're trying to say but as it stands there's no such thing and actually just regurgitated nonsense
i'm positive someone in the future is building a time machine to come back and rescue us from these people
😂😭
😄
Nobody comes back because of such a silly scam.
Looks like a space elevator idea
It feels like there's something off with the cost/benefits of this...the cost of putting giant mirrors in space would be astronomical compared to the value of a few extra hours of electricity. He said "one satellite doesn't produce a ton of power but after that we just launch more and more..." BIG hand-wave there. To scale that up globally you're talking about an insane amount of reflectors in space, so much junk in orbit, so many potential problems, all just to boost the efficiency of solar farms somewhat? It's a huge and messy fix to a problem with many simpler solutions, like nuclear, for one...
Yeah I think this would be more practical if they were just doing like concert lighting. Light up a battlefield. Having a fake sun at a football game.
@@jamesbowser9350 On the website it seems to allow consumers to “reserve a patch of sunlight” so maybe that’s the direction they’re heading. It would be pretty amazing for special events, parties, marriage proposals etc.
Placing mirrors in space to enhance solar farms is impractical. The mirrors would need to be at least as large as the farms themselves to reflect enough sunlight, making them extremely costly and challenging to deploy and maintain. Light disperses over vast distances, reducing efficiency, and atmospheric conditions further diminish the amount of sunlight reaching the solar panels. Additionally, building and launching such massive structures would be prohibitively expensive. It's more cost-effective and efficient to invest in improving solar technology and infrastructure on Earth rather than relying on complex and expensive space-based solutions.
@@JuanVillasante Thank you for the technical explanation of what felt intuitively obvious. This seems like an investor scam or something...
@@OuterEdgeOutpost And that’s not even considering other issues, like regulatory problems or the challenges with reflections themselves. Space agencies and companies like SpaceX go to great lengths to minimize reflection-painting satellites black to avoid interfering with observations from Earth. Yet, this idea proposes putting hundreds of massive reflectors into orbit on purpose, creating a giant mess in space. It’s impractical, poorly thought out, and would likely face significant opposition from both regulatory bodies and the scientific community. Instead of solving problems, it would create a host of new ones that we’re not equipped to handle.
$40B is nothing in the grand scheme of cheap solar energy
That's the moment I tuned out.
it's not about money, it's about an investment in those muslim/north african countries and making sure it won't bite you later... no way!
Their whole premise is that having a ton of satellites in space is cheapter than transmitting power from solar farms on the other side of the planet. I don't believe that for a second.
For 40b it's also going to lift 100,000s people from poverty. There is an ROI for europe and Africa. This project is greddy, the ROI is only the two founders (scam artists). Its also based on already existing solar installations which only benefits "rich" country.
We spend $1 trillion per year on Military. True, $40B is nothing
Proof that big idea != good idea
"!=" = perfect lol
This is really the silliest idea I ever heard of
As much as i love the concept i feel like this is going to be multiple times more expensive than it is worth. Like orders of magnitude. They at best will need areas in space of reflective material equal to areas on the surface of solar panels to achieve the same output assuming perfect redirection. Percentage of light hitting the ground will be higher the closer it is to the earth, and low earth satilite space will have more value that will eventually likely require renting / insurance to send sattilites to. Reflectors for energy are unlikely to make the economic cut. Although I'm sure they already know this. The actual data and estimates they're coming up with will have actual value and be interesting to learn about, but I think talking about the problems openly by asking hard questions in interview format would reveal too much about their buisness. Hoping you dive into it for the extended interview but i understand why theyd keep that data / knowlege close to their chest.
I agree.. also, solar is getting super efficient now, and dual sided as well. There is also going to be limited space with all the stuff floating already at low earth orbit.. also, will the cool sunsets be ruined by this? 😅
I don't go too much into that in the sit down interview - but I do know they're thinking a lot about it. The value of S³ is that we'll be back for follow up episodes as they develop, we'll know more then.
"Like" is not engineering studies. "i feel like" is not a good financial numbers source. Sorry. Your data is insufficient.
Depends on how big they can make the reflectors and how cheap rockets get.
If they can harvest football field sizes areas of sunlight and focus them onto a regular 2 x 2 (or whatever) solar panel, that could provide a lot of power.
Sometimes people forget that most of the people sleep at night.
Astronomers complaining about Starlink obstructing Space view are gonna have a fun time dealing with this technology LOL..
it breaks my heart that something like this is gaining traction. They know not what they are doing.
I think the military would love to turn this into a weapon once it's been proven by these guys to be affordable. Having the ability to selectively see at night with a 5km radius could be a huge benefit in war depending on who controls it. So one side can benefit with seeing at night, while disadvantaging the enemy with extreme heat during the day by using it like a magnifying glass on an already hot and sunny area. Although, this also looks like some geeks just being geeks with a hot air balloon, so I'm not too worried unless it actually works
@@Chaxlotl Because bombing and destruction isn't the only goal of the military, and a small drone isn't going to affect as large of an area either
@@Chaxlotl I mean there's always alternatives each with their own pros and cons. Thats why there's an arsenal of all sorts of equipment for different situations. It brings more possible tactics to the table. For example a helicopter with a light can do something similar, but has the con of being dangerous to fly over an area because it can be shot down. A 5km light could be used to expose enemies in a way they don't expect. The element of surprise could change situations very fast from being stealthy with night vision to sudden change of plans due to dealing with daytime conditions at any moment. I'm not a guy who is interested in the military, so I'm not the most knowledgeable about weapons and what is most effective, but it sure does sound like something that could have some benefits over other technologies in war
but hear me out, what if you narrow the stream of light to concentrate energy, would it be possible to set things on fire, let's say oil refinery? i mean, kind of like lighting up something with a magnifying glass?
Legend has it that Archimedes used the lenses to burn the Roman sails in Syracuse, Sicily, using burning lenses (in 212 BC). In any case, this type of technology opens up to many military uses, first and foremost the night illumination of the enemy to make him lose any initiative, they should rename it: the eye of Sauron!
It doesn't.
As much as I love technology and science. The question I think many people are forgetting is "should we". There is a reason why the sunshines one side of the planet and we already have a natural "mirror" in the sky (for those that don't know what I am talking about, I am talking about the moon) and the intensity of the reflectiveness of the moon isn't the same intensity as a mirror which can reflect the same intensity. So these are things to consider and also other environmental impacts as well.
I'm worried about the atmosphere scattering light all over. I wonder if there's a way to get around that.
Just one thought, obviously not what they said in the video and not complete on my end: I'm starting to think about diffracted light bleeding into the night sky during humidity causing issues at night, so one way to circumvent that problem on humid nights is only target panels during dawn, dusk, twilight, and evening, so that the bleedover effect doesn't interfere with sleep and darkness. This would mean the space array is best used closer to the land panels on humid nights, and means they don't lose space reflector capacity due to double and triple hop networks on humid nights. On dry nights, diffraction is less of an issue, so the space reflectors would get to consider multihop network issues while they consider lighting up ground panels more of the night.
A sentence is a complete thought. A question ends in a question mark (?). Since this is entirely bogus, it will have no environmental impact.
Rip to any planes that’s get a nice beam of fresh sun in there eyes while flying at night
All pilots have maps that indicate hazards such as mines with explosives, military areas etc. so these solar farms would likely receive prominence on these charts as a potential hazard to aviation
It’s along the terminator
@@zbjz Then the problem arises, if you add to many farms flight paths will become too congested for planes. And if there's not enough farms for it matter, than is this technology even worth it for such little amount of solar farms?
Warlords: A sun beam from space? I love this idea!!!
This will be very useful to power solar roadways at night.
Type 1 civilization here we come
😂 never thought about that but basically your right... us playing with the 🌞s energy In space is the start of type 1 pretty much
This has got to be one of the smartest dumb ideas ive seen lately. The size you'd need to make this feasible and the horrible land use vs output of even the best panels. It's absolutely absurd to think this is worth even five minutes of thought.
It's worth way more than 5 minutes of thought.
These solar farms are already there. They are already built and they are already profitable. If you can sell them some sunlight and make them slightly more profitable you get some of that profit too. Business works like that
yeah.. I mean you can do the math of energy/area from the sun, and then mass/area of mylar, and find this is about 1000 times too expensive to be worth it
@@RedRyan Yeah No one is going to be happy to see bright objects floating at night especially Observatories.
@@RedRyan anything is "profitable" with enough government subsidies.
@@rexmann1984 sure, but it's not profitable for society. Something has to be profitable above the subsidy is to be profitable for All of us
This is not gonna fly
i feel like there are many challenges that need to be overcome to turn this idea in to reality , i am happy that you are finding commercial uses for space which should lower the cost to get there (economies of scale) and unlock even more uses
Feelings aren't engineering.
@@bradallen1832neither are investment scams like this
Sounds like the preliminary step to a Dyson’s sphere.
Tristan, this idea is the asymptotic limit of Ben's Rube-Goldbergian tendency to manifest interesting pie-in-the-sky ideas that ultimately yield no practical value back down on earth. You're young and very talented and maybe you're happy to take this risk as a big, professional experiment, but be wise!
The Eye of Sauron 👁️🔥
Couple of concerns. Ben just being so dismissive of batteries as a reason to do this is naive. Storage is both fundamental and a necessity. Weather will always occur.
Light will naturally diffuse through atmosphere. This is harder than it sounds.
"diffused" or absorbed as HEAT, i belive we are forgeting a variable in this equation.
Holy f. One superb idea after another. Can't wait for Perpetual motion machine from a random Indian dude in a couple of years
Hey I am all for this idea. It may work and all the objections and unforeseen problems once known will add complexity but absolutely everything we already do increases complexity with implementation. Of course. We have very little indeed that works to scale that is not in fact quite complex. And I would definitely say that almost all of it has been fine tuned via automation. Of course homegrown tech feels better to the intuition of engineers everywhere but don’t let that stop you from doing this amazing trial and error work. And complexity funneled to automation is exactly what has been speeding us to advanced tech. Because it so often does work.
I love sarcastic humor!
I think it's going to be expensive to maintain, and to launch aluminum foil into space, you have to withstand light pressure, so you have to push it regularly to maintain orbit.
Moreover, the aluminum foil will be blurred and rough by high-energy particles/high-speed cosmic dust, which means that the life of a single aluminum-plastic film spacecraft is very limited, which requires low-cost transportation capacity support.
And then there's the issue of orbit, and of course the cost of launching from this high-latitude orbit is slightly higher
❤from chinese
If they wish, they can also practice the orbit control technology based on light pressure ( )
Then the Earth-Moon transfer is performed using light pressure and electric thrust ( )
That looks like a beginning of a Dyson sphere. Very cool
Maybe later you can reflect sunlight away from earth to cool this place down a bit!
time for light pollution 2.0
the fact these two worked hard and long enough to get this far without stopping and thinking about light pollution is sad. They think the beams are invisible, they will not be. the sky is BLUE but the sun rays are invisible? something they should research in 1 minutes on google.
Hi, i just want to suggest you two things:
1. Look what is called digital micromirror device and check how does it shaps the wavefront and direct light by using holographic methods.
2. If you think it is gonna work, just try making some origami based macroscopic DMDs for reflection.
Thank me later.
Tripathi Om Sarveshwarpati
Why not just use nuclear
lol
Fukushima. Zaporizhzhia. Three Mile Island. Chernobyl.
@lukepapamadrid bad response nuclear has made so much progress since then and you should probally look into why those meltdowns happened instead of spreading fear
Why not have both
won't this create a giant sky flashlight? when its suppose to be night time.
will be more like a narrow beam of light
Only where they point it. That can only go wrong two ways: (1) evil people do it. That's why I want these people to do it, since they're not evil. (2). They fail to control it.
@BK-uf6xm still, atmosphere may scatter this beam of light in a way that there will be light in a greater area than predicted
More like a laser than a flashlight, only visible when it's pointed at you
@@basilcurrie8138 how can a person be this dumb?
Won't the reflectors only work for an hour or so near the termination point? I guess that's a really good thing. just wondering how it can be better... I suppose using a two stage reflector system may make sense?
That's probably the plan looking at the orbits.
But if they are adding one hour or 2 of peak solar electricity to solar farms all around the world, at peak times, that is worth billions!
Just one thought, obviously not what they said in the video and not complete on my end: I'm starting to think about diffracted light bleeding into the night sky during humidity causing issues at night, so one way to circumvent that problem on humid nights is only target panels during dawn, dusk, twilight, and evening, so that the bleedover effect doesn't interfere with sleep and darkness. This would mean the space array is best used closer to the land panels on humid nights, and means they don't lose space reflector capacity due to double and triple hop networks on humid nights. On dry nights, diffraction is less of an issue, so the space reflectors would get to consider multihop network issues while they consider lighting up ground panels more of the night.
What’s the potential impact on the environment, climate, and wildlife? Seems like with climate change already being out of control we should be considerate of not accelerating it.
Gonna make solar farms even hotter then they already are
I never like knocking someones idea and always try and see the positives but the challenges involved in this is just insane. I'd love to be proven wrong and be the idiot that was the doubter
What are the seemingly insurmountable challenges?
There are just desperately seeking for sponsors who are more stupid than the idea itself
You combine this with a spin launch system and it might be cost effective.
Unfortunately spin launch is highly unlikely to ever work. Their massively publicized tests got their payload to an altitude of 7.6km. They haven’t even reached the height of a normal commercial airline flight, let alone space, and the problems with launching it faster increase exponentially.
Maybe on the moon one day.
I really want to hear a follow up on this story. It's a crazy idea, but a practical nightmare. I do want to hear their economic calc behind it if I would own X amount of MWp
What happens when you pass the area of sunset, and go to the dark side of the earth, you theoretically could only reflect for a couple hours after sunset… like satellites.
Or, hear me out, we could just mass produce a lot of Small Modular Molten Salt Reactors using thorium as fuel and put them all over the place. Put one at every current power substation and create a highly redundant distributed grid that doesn't rely on delicate and expensive high voltage transmission lines.
I feel sorry for these guys, they are doomed to fail.
I don't know about this one.... sure, it's an interesting idea, but not really necessary. The problem of intermittent energy from solar arrays isn't the lack of sunlight - it's that the abundance of energy from them aren't stored. The molten salt solar arrays in California, for example, already run through the night since the molten salt (from a day's worth of concentrated sun-powered heat) continues to produce steam after the sun goes down. I'd love to see these guys put their energy into novel ideas for storing energy rather than novel ideas of changing night to day.
Basically selling light.
I’m not sure I understand the economics here - some quick math shows the business case just doesn’t close. Mylar weighs 0.024 kg/m^2 (15u thick). The total area of the solar farms in California is 133,493 acres = 540227004 m^2. If you want the solar panels to receive the same amount of power via reflection, then you need at least this much surface area, which translates to 13,000 metric tons of exclusively Mylar.
This does not include the reaction wheels, thrusters, actuators, or structure of the satellite, just assuming a magic Mylar mirror floating above the solar panels - in reality you would need a constellation of mirrors to reliably provide power with all the associated components I mentioned above.
A Falcon 9 launch costs $70m and can deliver 22 tons to LEO. This means it will require a minimum of 591 Falcon 9 launches, about $413.7b in launch costs. Assuming a satellite life of 10 years (the current largest constellation, SpaceX Starlink, is about 5 years), that means it needs to generate $41.4b in revenue per year to just break even on launch costs.
The California solar energy grid generates 47 GW of power, so assuming Reflect Orbital can power this grid for 2 hours after sunset that would be 94 GWh of power per day. In California, electricity costs about $0.30/kWh, so 94 GWh = $28.2m/day. Going with the 10yr lifespan, that means a lifetime revenue of $102.93b, about 1/4 of the launch cost.
I’d love if the Reflect team could share some numbers on how they think this could work. Even with VERY generous assumptions, the business case just does not close here for me.
SpaceX rideshare, based on their website, is ~$300k for 50kg payload on a 1/4 Plate.
You're doing the math with current technology. Your first axiom is highly flawed.
interesting… it’s all about the mirror folding compression rate (then it’s expansion), together with cost for payload launch on the rockets. The movements themselves are a given Already… I’ve worked on O3b/Ses/mPower and those pointed beams out from multi passing satellites were already a solved issue… and it works really nicely
@@conradocaon4578Makes sense, that’s cool stuff! I was neglecting the packaging challenges and assuming they could fully utilize the payload mass in the fairing volume of the LV, but assuming that the total reflective area >= solar panel area, otherwise the power density would decrease.
Please! Keep the nights dark, I want to see the stars instead of powering the madness on earth 😢
Hope it doesn't shine onto a bunch of people doing astronomy, you could get aome toasted eyeballs 👀 🔥
But I would love to see this in action. It's like a reverse solar eclipse
It's over.
Than imagine… they focus the beam 👁️👄👁️
This is an innovative solution. The devil will be in the details, both from an engineering and economics perspective. Thanks for sharing! It is thought-provoking.
this could also be used to boost solar powered Psudo Satelite aircraft. let me know if you want to test it. I have a solar plane.
I don't know if they get high enough for continous power delivery. It might be possible if you get 2 extra seconds for every meter you go up then you need to be up about 50000ft. So higher then most passengers planes.
Now there's a cool idea. These mirrors would effectively shorten the night for the plane by a couple of hours, which would let you use smaller batteries.
If you launch the sats in geostationary they would
1. work 95 % of the time
2. Could be positioned considering demand
3. LEO mirrors would experience lots of atmospheric drag and space debris, this Wouldn't be so much of a problem in GEO
If you used a secondary mirror the primary mirror would face the sun directly instead of doing it at an angle, combined with 95% uptime that would more than make up for the higer cost of GEO . I mostly thought about this when I wondered how we could get rid of the winter, you would aim beams of solar infrared and possibly visible light to heat up large urban areas, i roughly calculated that you would need between 1/5 and 1/20 of the city's area as a mirror depending on whether you use visible light during they day and of the desired temperature.
I would build a statite. You can use radiative pressure to achieve a unique geostationary equalibrium. Geostationary orbits are quite valuable resource that don't want to fill with competing space debris. These mirrors need to outside that or they turn up with space junk.
geostationary is a specific spot in orbit for each location on earth and each of those spots are really high demand (expensive). Might mess with the economics of the business model.
They would provide more power and they could last longer because they would experience less drag which on a mirror as light as this would be considerable in LEO but much less so in GEO@@Drakoman07
Geostationary orbit is also far more expensive, and would require far larger mirrors due to the increased distance.
Oh yeah, that has massive military use as well. Like surprising the enemy or to level the plainfield during night operations, or to just continue nighttime operations in the industry or military at a scale where artifiical light is not feasible
But the economics will be nigh impossible. Perhaps with fresnel lenses or something. Per square meter in space they can only expect 1kwh on earth. With intermittency due to cloud coverage. It seems economically impossible, but it is really energy at a service. That should actually work out then in the long run
In addition to cost accounting, I see a few very difficult engineering problems. This video actually only talks about money and the basic idea. But the main problem is whether it is technically feasible at all. And to be honest, I have great doubts about that.
I love the innovation but before anyone immediately starts investing… let’s talk about why this will never likely happen.
1. Light scatters Rayleigh scattering is what happens when the light passes through our atmosphere even if the light is strong enough (which is another issues) it will be spread out across a large part of its directed area.
Next (as mentioned a bit ago) light will diffuse and be significantly less intense.
2. Communication issues will occur making this a legal and international mess. Large mirrors or reflectors in satellites will cause issues to other satellites and radio waves / communications from going where they need to go. No government would allow that type of tech ruining important communications.
3. Even if we can look past all of that (we can’t) the environmental impact would be negative. Beaming sunlight to areas where wildlife may interprete it as sun light could affect the ecosystem.
4. It’s not economically viable. The cost with such low return wouldn’t be worth it even if they did manage to get@past the other issue.
5. Geopolitical concerns. Nations would have an issue with the ability to redirect sunlight which could potentially lead to a ton of other issues.
It’s theoretically possible and looks good on paper or as a concept video … but it’s not likely going to happen because of overwhelming political and engineering issues that just can’t be overlooked or easily overcome.
This will be amazing for search & rescue operations
Could have universal health care but we get this garbage.
why do we want to erase the night? Why do we not value our night sky? I'd like to get to a point where we don't even WANT to do such horrible atrocities.
Incredible idea. What a time to be alive. Ad astra gentlemen. Thank you S3 for this.
Does anyone else notice that this is basically a dyson sphere?
I don't get how you would transform, 100m² of solar energy in space to km² on ground. Let's say you have 1.3kw/m² solar power in space. So 130kw with loss of difraction and so on. You get not a lot on the ground, how can it be a business ?
They can't. Placing mirrors in space to enhance solar farms is impractical. The mirrors would need to be at least as large as the farms themselves to reflect enough sunlight, making them extremely costly and challenging to deploy and maintain. Light disperses over vast distances, reducing efficiency, and atmospheric conditions further diminish the amount of sunlight reaching the solar panels. Additionally, building and launching such massive structures would be prohibitively expensive. It's more cost-effective and efficient to invest in improving solar technology and infrastructure on Earth rather than relying on complex and expensive space-based solutions.
Investors give them money. They work on it, pay themselves a salary from investments, and when it fails they repeat the process with another idea.
I was starting to think it might have some uses (not for the solar farms though)...until they mentioned Space freaking X
Hat's off to these guys for trying big things. Other people are just working, eating, sleeping, travelling and doing stupid things.
eating sleeping traveling or stupid things??? you mean, living their lives???
@@markanderson4163 He means not taking risks and being lazy
pretty crazy idea. Better idea is to move electricity around the world using undersea cables just like we send data. Then you can just have local solar panels and send excess power into the grid where it can be used where it is dark.
so much is gonna happen in the energy world in the next decade
How much money does it take to put enough material in space to power a solar farm all night compared to the battery storage you would have to make?
There's an EEVBLOG debunk videoon it, and he enabled critical thinking unlike most t channels, and as the reflected beam spreads out by 0,5°m the 10x10m mirrors reflection will be spread out to a circle of 5km diameter when it hits earth. 100m2 will reflect 100kW AT THE VERY BEST ANGLE MAX, and spreading out 100kW of power over a circle of 5km will deliver an average of 5MILLIWATTS per m2 instead of the 1000W or 1.000.000mW a normal solar panel can get at noon from sunlight.
Guess what, 0,005W instead of 1000W will not even be enough to run solor plan'ts eectronics. Tht is the equivlent od NOTHING in practicle terms, that's full moon level of power.
Which more YT channels would enable critical thinking and at least run SOME numbers before they hype stuff.
05:03 "a lot of people don't realise that rockets exist" 🤔
What orbital altitude will you be using? And how will you maintain the orbit, I presume it will be a solar sail?
This is one of the most smart idea yet simple . All the best for the team
I love this idea! It always fascinated me after learning about the Russian Znamya satellites. I did some back of the napkin calculations a few years ago, and even if we’re talking micron-thick tinfoil, it would be far too expensive to put into geosynchronous orbit at anywhere near the level necessary for much power generation.
In LEO the surface area necessary decreases dramatically for the same power output, but then you have the problem of whizzing around the world every few hours, meaning you don’t get much time over your target solar farm.
In theory, you could have centrifuges control the angle as they orbit the earth so they can hit multiple solar farms through its orbit, but this will be more difficult the larger the reflector.
There’s also the issue of light pollution. People complain about Starlink which are really tiny and designed to be as non-reflective as possible. Imagine when instead they’re huge and as reflective as possible. The light pollution in the night sky would cause some serious complaints.
It would take something like a super cheap starship, or massive moon production to get something like this set up.
Unfortunately what they’re building is too dependent on the rest of the industry progressing dramatically to really succeed. Unless they have billions of their own money to throw at the problem, the timeframe for a payoff is going to be far, far too long for any reasonable investment.
Maybe there’s some government or military applications that would be warranted though (giant mirrors warming Siberian towns in the winter or something, or reflectors lighting up an enemy position to blind any night vision, and make them easier targets.
Best of luck! It’s a really cool project either way.
The expense can be lowered if launched on Starship. This is another Starship enabled tech. Those sails would quickly capture masses of excess atmosphere in low LEO. High LEO, MEO and HEO might be better, but optimizing the benefits of LEO (autofail cleanup and less beam interference) would have to be balanced. Going higher up means transferring more light further. Probably they're looking at high orbits. They can say that the amount of light hitting other satellites is equal to sunlight if they don't concentrate the beams, causing very little disturbance to other satellites, so perhaps that's the best approach.
Wouldn’t this increase global warming by increasing the amount of sunlight reaching earth?
I work in construction,..you know how hard it is to move panels or mirrors around with out breaking them,...i got so many questions now
I work at a electric Hydro company and we have wind farms that does 40Mw almost around the clock but we get to use the river systems as a battery by holding back water or using less while wind it high
It is difficult to use reservoir energy storage in the plains
@@ddzz3927 the wind farm is in the plains but the rivers im talking about are not.
How much extra heat does the extra sunlight produce? Is it really the best way to produce / use energy at night?
THESE 2 ARE BATSHIT INSANE. KEEP GOING GOOGGOOGOGOGOGOGO
Extremely simple extremely smart! Kudos
It also has to be something secure, for the planet and it people
two words... space junk. game over, thanks for playing!
so sick
so you make solar panel for free electricity to pay for it at night?
This would be useful in polar regions. You could get way more than an hour of extra service in winter
This. Planet moves slower at those latitudes allowing for that.
Im the only one who thinks this is some super villain comic shit ?
Line a death beam of sun light ?
That's a promising idea with great potential. Even if they won't be able to commercialize it, they will get bought out in 5-10 years by a space conglomerate for their tech and know-how.
I mean for rescue or military uses it could be effective but no way with reducing electricity costs
you need humongous mirrors for that, and it's Economically impossible to make such huge mirrors to reflect the sunlight...
What a good idea
Could this cause more global warming though?
it might be minimal if you have a couple hundreds, but thousands... part per unit is going to be smaller than starlink, so its possible.
and part of the light will be absorbed by the atmosphere.
so personally these ppl scare me...
At scale, it could become an issue
I thought this idea was stupid, because launching things into space is expensive. So I did the math, and it actually adds up. NASA proposed a solar sail (which is basically a giant space mirror) that is 1200 m^2 and weighs 32kg, with 80kg of support. This is 112kg to launch into space. With the current cheapest rocket (falcon , $3600 per kgg) this would cost $400k. But with SpaceX's next-gen starhip they aim to get this down to just $20 per kg, so $2240. Even assuming the starship costs are 10x higher, it would only cost $22.4k to send into space, or $6.3 per square meter. A square meter of regular solar panel costs around $200. Assuming this mirror reflects 100% of the sunlight 50% of the time, it would generate $12k a year worth of electricity (assuming 10 cents per kwh). It would pay itself off in about two years., and that's being very pessimistic with the starship costs. I haven't factored in the material costs, but it's really just a giant mirror so when you scale this up the materials should be cheap compared to the rocket launch. This can pay itself off in just a few months if SpaceX reaches its starship goal. To put that into perspective, regular solar takes 10-20 years to pay itself off. And again, even if starship gets 10x more expensive, it would take these space mirrors 16 years to pay themselves off, basically the same as solar and even then there are tons of optimizations you can do, like reducing the structure weight and increasing the size of the panels. It's insane how launching a mirror into space can be more cost-effective than regular solar.
What would be the impact on climate?? What do you think about the heat you’ll add to the atmosphere? Did you do any research yet?
Nuclear puts them out of business
glad you secretly solved the waste problem lol
Amazing video. Totally deserves more views.
If the satellites are always on the Terminator then how can theyy supply sunlight to places that are in midnight? The midnight place will be 90° to the satellite constellation. Feels like this just extends the working hours of the solar plant and not make it work throughout the night.
Just think if SpaceX incorporated this onto the starlink satellites,
If someone hack the satellite, will this become a horrible weapon?
it's not a maginfied laser. it's just sun light
TLDR: They probably look at it more like how much they can earn per satellite. Back of the envelop calculations say with 1000 satellites they can make $250m a year indefinitely and produce 400GWh of useable energy which is same order of magnitude as a small wind farm.
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Long version:
When looking at approximate unit costs one should look at the fixed cost of launching each satellite and how much the energy reflected back to earth can be sold for. I have no idea what their numbers are but lets play around with something like this:
50kg SpaceX rideshare is $300k-$600k. Lets say $500k for one satellite rideshare launch.
We can perhaps assume the mylar is 50% of the payload, so 25kg of Mylar at 28g / meter^2 with thickness 20um is around 800-1000m^2 of mylar and therefore could perhaps be around 1000*3 = $3000 if Mylar costs $3/m^2,. This cost is negligible relative to the cost of the launch. My guess is that whatever makes up the remaining 25kg payload would be no more than 10x this. And so approximately negligible also. In other words, we can go with the cost of building and getting a satellite into Sun-Synchronous orbit being mostly the launch cost and we assume that we can get 1000m^2 of mylar per satellite.
So at the absolute best possible case scenario assuming NO other losses, then we can reflect 1000m^2 of solar radiation per satellite. Solar radiation is ~1360W/m^2 at SSO so that yields ~1.4MW of reflected solar energy available per satellite.
We can now compute how much we can earn from this. Lets assume regular electricity costs around $0.15 / KWh during the day but shoots to $0.65 in the evening during peak usage in Calfironia for example. Then If they provided it at say $0.6/KWh that would be sufficiently competetive. So assuming they can use their sattelite to reflect 1.4MW for 30 minutes at 25% efficiency conversion by the solar farm they supply, then that is worth 1400kW*0.25*0.5h*0.6$/kWh = $100. If we further assume they can fill some more slots - assuming each slot is 30 minutes - then there would be 48 slots in a day and at perhaps 20-25% of slots taken thats maybe around 10 slots so worth $1000/day. And to improve this, if each satellite was smaller, they could individually aim it at peoples houses and probably eventually fill most of their slots. Thereby maxing out around $4000/day per satellite.
If there was perfect sun over a year, then 365*4000 ~ $1.5m dollars earning potential per year per satellite. However assuming weather reduces that significantly (maybe to 30%) and assuming they dont manage to fill more than 20 slots in a day, we arrive at a yearly earning potential of $1500k*0.3*0.5 ~ $250k.
So, in other words, for a $500k investment, and earning $250k a year, it takes 2 years to pay it off and then its basically just an amazingly scaleable source of income. With 1000 satellites, after 2 years they could potentially be earning $250m a year. Sounds like an amazing business to me (with the caveat that these are all very much inaccurate numbers but should be sufficiently ballpark) …
Great story, maybe some idiot with more money then brains will invest.