Dig Up Stupid! Or Drill Up!
Earlier this month the United Nations climate summit took place in Bali, Indonesia, with many nations attending looking to drill down for energy. But one of the smallest nations attending the conference is deciding to dig up (in the immortal words of Chief Clancy Wiggum from The Simpsons), or, more literally, look up.
The annual meeting – which this year took special significance after the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its report – can often be a boiling pot of ideas, both wondrous and stupid. From blackening the skies with soot to block the sun to cultivating ocean farms of seaweed to absorb carbon dioxide, the sheer weight of ideas is tremendous.
But the rule of statistic probability tells us that amongst the detritus of such mind-bogglingly idiotic ideas that at least one diamond should appear.
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And so it is that the small island nation of Palau and the United States Pentagon are looking towards the heavens for their energy provision, and thus an aid to the environment.
The plan is being looked at by the United States military, and involves beaming energy down from orbiting satellites, providing “affordable, clean, safe, reliable, sustainable, and expandable energy for mankind.”
Tommy Remengesau Jr., president of the western Pacific country Palau, is also on board saying “We’d like to look at it.”
A study issued by Defense Department in October of this year (2007, we’re nearly through) concluded that space power – being the collection of energy in space, and then transferred planet-side – would be a potentially useful means of energy for US military operations.
A month earlier, in September, American entrepreneur Kevin Reed proposed at the 58th International Astronautical Congress in Hyderabad, India, suggested that Palau’s uninhabited Helen Island would be a likely spot for a demonstration. Such a demonstration would consist of a massive “rectifying antenna,” or rectenna, with a 260-foot-diameter (80-meter-diameter), to receive 1 megawatt of power. The energy would be submitted to Earth by an orbiting satellite.
And though such a structure would be able to provide power for up to a thousand homes, on the empty island of Helen it would “be intended to show its safety for everywhere else,” Reed said in a telephone interview from California.
Reed’s own US-Swiss-German consortium will begin to manufacture the necessary ultralight solar panels within two years. In addition they would attract financial support from other companies, hoping to prove why their products – launch vehicles, satellites, transmission technology – would be best for such a project.
The project, which could be finished as soon as 2012, received a boost in the arm from the past UN conference after the Palau president was given more details by a partner of Reed’s. “We are keen on alternative energy,” Palau’s Remengesau said. “And if this is something that can benefit Palau, I’m sure we’d like to look at it.”
Associated Press via Nat Geo - “Drilling Up” — Some Look to Space for Energy
Photo Courtesy of NASA
