Essay by Eric Worrall
University of Glasgow academic Onur Çelik has proposed huge space mirrors could allow solar panels to satisfy electricity demand in the morning and after sundown.
Reflectors in space could make solar farms on Earth work for longer every day
Published: January 12, 2024 4.24am AEDT
Onur Çelik
Postdoctoral Research Associate in Space Technology, University of GlasgowIf you happened to be looking at the sky in Europe on a cold night on February 5 1993, there is a chance you could have seen a dim flash of light. That flash came from a Russian space mirror experiment called Znamya-2.
Znamya-2 was a 20-metre reflective structure much like aluminium foil (Znamya means “banner” in Russian), unfurled from a spacecraft which had just undocked from the Russian Mir space station. Its goal was to demonstrate solar energy could be reflected from space to Earth.
This was the first and only time that a mirror had ever been launched into space for that purpose. But, three decades on, colleagues and I believe it’s time to revisit this technology.
Unlike proposals to build solar power stations in space and transmit energy down to earth, all the generation would still happen down here. Crucially, these reflectors could help solar farms generate electricity even when direct sunlight is not available, especially during evening and early morning hours when demand for clean energy is greatest. Colleagues and I call this concept “orbiting solar reflectors”.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/reflectors-in-space-could-make-solar-farms-on-earth-work-for-longer-every-day-220554
The following is a video of the concept;
Technically this seems feasible – but at what cost? Solar energy is already absurdly expensive. Adding large space structures might reduce battery backup requirements, but it still seems hideously expensive.
There is also a crucial difference between orbital solar panels and orbital mirrors – orbital panels could still transmit power to the ground when the weather is overcast.
Microwaves from an orbital solar power station can penetrate cloud cover, reflected sunlight not so much – unless there is enough concentrated sunlight to burn away the cloud cover.
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If I eat a steak rather than bugs though, I’ll cause irreparable harm to the planet.
This isn’t science, this is religion.
medium-rare
The bugs or the steak?
What could possibly go wrong?
That is the first thing that to mind.
My thought process is pretty serial. After blabbering on below, even thinking that a MEMs approach is the “easiest” approach, I remembered your post. So, going into sci-fi land here for a moment…
To get something like direct sun insolation the orbiting reflector would need to subtend 1/2 degree and put all of the reflected light spots on one place, that is, all piled up on top of each other. In effect, you have created an artificial sun. If in Low Earth Orbit, with a distance from reflector to ground of 300 miles, the reflector would need to be 2.6 miles wide. The smallest spot it could form on the earth would be 2.6 miles wide too. Let’s assume it is a coordinated swarm of tiltable mirrors, since it has to track the ground position. That’s a lot of elements to fill in 15 million square meters. But let’s say you got them up there and coordinated. At that distance you couldn’t exceed one sun irradiance. So, no real safety concern. If the array was larger, or there was more than one array, yeah, potential for nefarious hacking to bake some area. Like I said, sci-fi stuff.
Using the proposed system of 250m across reflector at a distance of 900km. The spot on the earth would be about 8km wide. The irradiance produced by a single reflector would be minuscule – 0.1% of normal isolation, about 1W/m2. Bummer.
Ever notice how all their patches and band aids and remedies for useless green renewable energy always rely on lots of FF to work?
It’s as if they don’t understand the concept of Occam’s Razor.
Of course the rockets that launch the reflectors will be hydrogen powered – supplied through the new pipelines that the Biden administration has sunk billions into developing. Since hydrogen burning only emits water vapor, there will be no additional CO2 caused by the launch.
I don’t think anyone told the administration brain trusts that water vapor is the greatest GHG.
We are experiencing a heat wave now, its now 10ºF (-12.2ºC) while the past few days have been -10ºF so it must be working?
Do I need a /sarc tag?
Oy vey!!!! The proponent of this nonsense watched too many James Bond movies. Next he’ll be proposing invisible Aston Martin cars…from the same movie.
Regards,
Bob
One problem with space mirrors to reflect sunlight to solar panels is…
Panels work best when under Full Sun. Full Bright Daylight.
You would need to light up the panels at night like it was day.
Everything in the surrounding environment would essentially lose their night time functions and think it was daylight 24 hours a day. Plants need sleep too.
Anyone living nearby such a “night time” solar array would also either need blackout curtains or they likely wouldn’t sleep too well. Unlike the CO2 nonsense, light pollution is actually a thing and it is known that artificial light (lack of dark nights) causes problems for many nocturnal animals. Even just adding more light to the early morning or late evening could create problems.
And birds, street and other lights are said to disrupt the lives of UK urban birds.
Exactly, Bob.
University of Glasgow academic Onur Çelik is fronting engineering nonsense! Despite what the above article states, his proposed concept is not even technically feasible at its most fundamental level.
Orbiting solar reflectors (not a new concept by any means) to reflect sunlight to solar farms on Earth would require precise and continuous positioning of the deployed “mirror” to maintain Sun-mirror-Earth point alignment, likely to arcsecond accuracy (hint: a 1 km wide target from 10,000 km in space subtends a half-angle of about 10 arcseconds).
The pointing will have to be done actively and continuously since the Sun-mirror-Earth point alignment continuously varies for any given Earth orbit. Now how does one do that with an extremely thin (i.e., lightweight) solar array without the pointing torques distorting the shape of the mirror.
Furthermore, go much lower orbiting in orbit and atmospheric drag will both deform the shape of the reflector and lead to its eventual atmospheric reentry . . . go much higher in orbit (say, all the way to geostationary altitude over the equator) and ANY deployable mirror cannot maintain the surface “figure” required to focus solar radiation to a spot even, say, 10 km wide on Earth’s surface.
Any technically-competent considerations of performing active pointing control and orbital ephemeris maintenance on such orbiting spacecraft of any meaningful solar reflector area will quickly show the annual propulsive mass requirements makes them totally infeasible.
It is, after all, rocket science.
James Bond?
I thought of “Real Genius”.
Who needs a laser and an orbital mirror to focus energy when you’ve got the Sun?
(Many an ant died when I was a kid with a magnifying glass! 😎
PS It looks like “Edit” is working again!
Remember: someone got paid for this. The institutions are a problem.
That someone had to do something in order to get paid. Probably ran out of sick leave, used up all his vacation time. A little brain storming session down at the saloon and “Presto!”, a solution in search of a problem. Using an unmanned rocket to put the mirror in place seems like a gamble. No doubt he’d be happy to occupy the pilot’s seat.
Actually using nukes would be more practical, but the Green Blob would object.
How about giant magnifying lenses? What could possibly go wrong there?
Unrelated but wanted to share — I just found myself at a page at “The Conversation”, whilst I am researching Australia’s embedded carbon in its exports and imports. On the page there is this — “You can trust this article because its written by academics” LOL!!!
I’ve always found the name of that outlet somewhat perplexing. They most certainly are not interested in any sort of actual conversation. I guess that’s what we can come to expect from “trusted academics” these days. If anyone told me that they were an “academic”, my natural reaction would be to assume that they are an ideologically captured shill for whoever is funding their latest research grants. There seem to be very few actual scientists in academia these days, just acolytes of Scientism.
The Conversation is not interested in conversation.
They should call themselves “The Dictatorship”.
I wouldn’t trust any academic to come up with a really feasible and economical plan for anything – that’s the job of engineers and company controllers!!! Physicists don’t have to take economics or business courses as part of their degree program – engineers do and have to use that knowledge every day along with the physics and chemistry.
Speaking of physics and chemistry. I listened to a very interesting podcast today between Mark P Mills & Peter Huntsman of Huntsman Inc.
It is unfortunately true that a very high percentage of “academics” are very highly educated (indoctrinated?) in very narrow fields of endeavor, with cadres of fellow travelers reinforcing their unworkable beliefs along the way. In many of them, simple practical tools and solutions elude them. I would trust a successful farmer with dirt under his fingernails harvesting his fields with a diesel tractor by moonlight long before I would trust an ‘academic’ proposing to charge his electric tractor by night with reflected sunlight. What could possibly go wrong?
Some ideas are so stupid that only academics believe in them.
George Orwell
Well, if CO2, water vapor, or methane actually caused significant warming from sunlight, then any significant energy transferred to the radiating, dark side of the planet would multiply that warming by a significant factor.
Sunlight transmission would be the least efficient way to generate electricity or heat. Microwave would be better, and easier to aim — but that would be unoriginal work for a research paper (not that this idea isn’t likely plagirism – depends on citations).
When this group successfully transmits their paper by heliograph for worldwide distribution, we might have begin to pay attention.
“Sunlight transmission would be the least efficient way to generate electricity”
Yes, there are much better ways to generate electricity such as nuclear power plants. No space launches required.
“easier to aim”
Just hoping their aim doesn’t get messed up and that microwave beam hits your house!
Orbit drift be damned.
Or jitter, or orbital debris erosion, or gyro/steering energy, or intervening/starlink/sirius/ISS/other leo objects.
On the microwave side, the energy striking my house, or even bareheaded me, fom an orbital range wouldn’t be felt.
On the reflective sunlight side, if it wasn’t concentrated by a concave mirror, it wouldn’t be strong enough to make up for the expense – the additional energy loss would make it useless.
If it was concentrated enough to be useful, and wasn’t dissipated by cloud, it would tend to fry birds, aircraft, and insects between the sattelite and the collector, just as it does in terrrestrial based concentrator generators. Solar collector generator operators today refer to birds that fly across the beam as flares, for the bright smoke trails they leave across the sky.
I admit I just read the title but that alone sounded so overblown and preposterous, like me planning ten moves ahead in chess when I can’t get the first move right.
Intense beams of concentrated sunlight from space. What could possibly go wrong?
Ivanpah on a planetary scale LOL
At least I won’t need to go to the tanning salon. ( don’t anyway). A lot of fruit needs sunlight to color so not all bad ….. Wait. What about global heating? It could make the oceans boil ….Oh, that’s right, they already are.
__________________________________________________
An admission that solar panels aren’t useful if ever there was one (-:
I see one unintended consequence immediately. The bats never come out of their caves and the subsequent insect explosion eats all the vegetation within weeks. What? This can’t be serious.
Short-sighted Climate Alarmists don’t do “ramifications”.
Definition:
“What does ramification mean in simple terms?
The ramifications are the broader effects that fan out into the world from one situation, or decision, that kicks it all off.”
Mao Zedong and the elimination of Sparrows in China led to the deaths of 15+ million in China. They had to import sparrows from the USSR
The dimwit who wrote this nonsense obviously has no idea of the cost to orbit a kilogram of payload at geosynchonous orbit.
Second, the author has no understanding that any payload delivered to geosync will require maintenance on a regular basis, as even there orbits will decay, and need to be adjusted via thrusters.Thrusters will need fuel.
Third, the author fails to understand that no existing space vehicle is capable of delivering human maintenance and repair crews to geosync.
Fourth, the author has no understanding that geosync is alreadly cluttered with large amounts of scrap from previous satellites. Collision with even a paint fleck can destroy an orbiting collector.
No, it isn’t feasible.
It’s worse than that. The article talks as if the mirrors are in low Earth orbit (they have to regularly re-orient to find a new target). Things in LEO will be affected by atmospheric drag & either de-orbit (burn up) or get boosted to a higher orbit periodically.
Replacing them, or refueling them frequently would be as expensive as it was to put them into orbit in the first case. There’s no way they could boost the solar panels output enough to make this cost-effective.
That’s why I talked about geosync. This is utterly impossible in low orbit because of constant need for altering the targeting of the mirrors continuously. What is amusing is seeing engineering solutions proposed by an amateur which are utterly improbable from the get-go. I’m certain the author will be a fine beneficiary of a DEI hiring process.
The author is totally of their rocker. Maybe ate the wrong sort of mushrooms. I hate to think about who’s paying their wage but it sure is not value for money.
Incredible, what has happened to academics? So if we were in effect to extend daytime by using mirrors in space wouldn’t the extended solar radiation contribute more heat to the atmosphere offsetting the alleged benefits of using solar panels for electricity rather than fossil fuels. Also what impact would that have on animal life and and humans alike?
Those are all questions the authors should have been asking themselves before writing the study.
“Microwaves from an orbital solar power station can penetrate cloud cover”
And you, and they can turn you into a microwave hot dog.
Nuclear really isn’t dangerous, not compared to this B$. Nor is it very expensive.
Naaaah, pretty feeble.
When it comes to ‘science’, we’re still a long way from Peak Junk
“solar panels to satisfy electricity demand in the morning and after sundown.” At what expense? And to what value? One or two more hours of solar energy? How many birds will be killed flying into the path of these rays? This people are possessed with the idea solar will work and be viable.
“This people are possessed with the idea solar will work and be viable. ”
Climate Alarmists don’t have many alternatives, in their efforts to eliminate CO2. It’s either windmills and/or solar. They reject nuclear electricity generation. So they try to come up with ways to make their alternatives work better without considering the ramifications of what they are proposing to do. The typical Climate Alarmist thinking process.
The big ‘tell’ here is that the greens know they’ve lost the game but are sliding into classic deep denial – the rationalizing stage. They are casting about for “patches” to fix a broken dream instead of letting go. It is a deeply immature simplistic hope. Sending mirrors into space would be the costliest ‘renewable’ ever. They can’t build a workable one on land – the Crescent Dunes molten salt generator an example.
Look at the pattern of ‘thought’. When land windmills proved disappointing, a land hungry idea, a chopping ground for millions of bats and birds and harmful to the health of nearby residents, they fixed it by deploying them ofshore. Now seabirds are getting chopped (less visibly) but whales are now washing up on the beaches and being driven into dangerous shipping lanes. With each “patch” comes escalating costs and more problems.
When anti-fossil fuel restrictions, regulations denying access to resources, blocking funding, pipeline restrictions … drove gas and coal prices sky high, the greens seemed unaware that renewables do not work without fossil fuel backup. This hammered costs of operating renewables mercilessly. The “patch”? Replace NG with dangerous hydrogen that costs 20x that of fossil gas.
Acute analysis. Assuming greens ‘believe’ in this crap. Some of it is pure cynical profiteering. The myth of ‘renewables’ has to be kept alive or a lot of rich people will lose their taxpayer funded incomes.
Besides being totally unacceptable because of environmental impacts, there is a intractable practical issue. These reflectors would be in low earth orbit. That means high ground speed (several miles/sec) which means these things would have to TRACK the ground arrays. This is simply an engineering impossibility. It’s kind of fun imagining the track solution with the convolution or the earth’s rotation, the array ground location, the reflector orbit, and the sun reflection half angle. It would make a nice homework problem in an orbital mechanics course. However, there is simply no way to build a huge reflector that could be wielded in such a way.
As has been pointed out in several comments, it’s basically an idiotic idea.
But I was thinking. There is an intractable problem no matter what orbit, even geostationary. Geostationary just means the reflector holds a constant ground position. The earth, and therefore the reflector, still rotates about an axis relative to the sun, so the reflector still has to track to maintain the correct half angle. Wobbling a miles across reflector just can’t be done.
There is another little problem – umbra. The sun subtends 1/2 degree. If you take a one mile diameter mirror and shine it say 300 miles, the “spot” it makes is about 3.6 miles across. That is a insolation dilution of about (I’m guessing because the illumination won’t be even) of about 6X. Insolation of 200 W/m^2, basically unless. From Geostationary orbit the spot would be 190 miles across. Don’t even think about curving the mirror.
I think it could be almost OK for usage as artificial sunlight for some towns close to polar circle in the polar night. 1/8 mile mirror making 0.5 mile sunny circle on Earth is just fine for town.
You don’t need curvature of mirror, just use two or more of them, make 200W/m2, 400W/m2 or 600W/m2.
1 mile mirror to 3.6 mile area is dilution 1/3.6^2 = 13x So you will get around 90W/m2
Peter, thanks for making those observations. I’ll expand on my above.
For the irradiance, It’s kind of complicated. This system can be considered as a pinhole lens, Close to the reflector (aperture stop) the reflected image of the sun is perfectly out of focus, and assuming 100% reflectance, the irradiance of the image is unity. As you go away from the reflector (to the far field) it becomes in effect, a pinhole lens, and an image of the sun is formed. The image at 300 miles would still be somewhat blurry (1mile + 0.0087rad*300miles = 3.6 miles), brightest in the center (my 200 W/m2 guess) fading to zero at the edge. The average radiant intensity would be as you point out, 1/3.6^2 = 7.7% of normal insolation.
Higher up you made some suggestions. A small (LOL) 1/8 mile mirror would be forming a pretty sharp image of the sun at 300 miles. The diameter of the image would be .0087rad*300miles = 2.6 miles. The umbra (unfocused light blur) would be almost gone. The irradiance profile across the image, oddly enough, would still not be perfectly even, it would instead be that of the sun as viewed directly – brightest in the center of the disc. The average insolation would be about 2.7 W/m2. That’s pretty bright compared to the full moon irradiance of 0.003 W/m2. A polar ground target would be an easier challenge, but still not practical by orders of magnitude IMO.
This is all academic as the practical difficulties of an agile tracking reflector are vastly insurmountable. Remember the first generation Iridium satellite “flashes”? Very bright but lasting for just a few seconds as the sun image moved across the earth at some miles/second. One can imagine instead of a monolithic reflector a “swarm” of smaller reflectors – a giant disconnected MEMS, if you will. This too is sci-fi stuff, and hardly starts to pass any engineering gut check.
I wished we could edit…
Anyway, to get something like normal insolation the reflector would need to be 2.6 miles across at 300 miles. It would then subtend 1/2 degree (like the sun) and be as bright as the sun. Something 2.6 miles across has an area of about 15 million square meters. So, we are talking about an array of a million or so mirrors in LEO that have to constantly move in coordination to track a ground solar array. All of that to get what, max 2 GW? The scale of stupidity is just astounding.
Since I’ve kind of gone down a rabbit hole a ways, I’ll talk about image formation some.
A fundamental quality of any optical system that forms an image is something called the Lagrange Invariant. Consider an ideal system with no losses due to scattering/absorption. If you trace a ray through this system there are 3 factors associated with the ray – ray height, ray angle, and index of refraction. The product of those three factors is the same at any plane in the system – the product is the Lagrange Invariant. It’s conservation of energy.
An imaging system performs a transfer or transform. The lens, whether it is some complex lens system, or a simple pinhole, creates a system in which there is a one to one correspondence between an object point and an image point. The only difference between a pinhole lens and a complex lens will be the aperture – the complex lens will have a far larger aperture than the pinhole (several orders of magnitude in area) and still produce a sharp image. And remember, the sun is an extended object.
There are optical systems that can “break” these rules. The strange non-imaging optical systems can do a concentration transform in which the output plane temperature is hotter than the surface of the sun. Of course, energy is conserved, it just looks strange.
I bring this up because there is a tendency for people to try to alter the conservation of energy law by cleverly proposing impossible systems. In my optical design career I’ve talked a few pretty sharp folks off that ledge.
Awesome reply, my knowledge of optics ends somewhere in counting magnification of my 3 inch telescope with various oculars.
Never thought about mirror behaving like pinhole lens.
Just checked the date. No not April yet, so that must mean an ‘academic’ actually imagined this mirrors in space idea, to maintain perpetual light over solar panels is a good concept. The obvious conclusion being it would enable them to become practical energy production sites. Unlike their present status.
Now, it is important to consider all ideas before dismissing them out of hand, because somewhere sometime the next Einstein paradigm shift in scientific understanding will emerge.
So,
As our only method of putting loads into space is rocket technology, which is about as fossil fuel dense as it gets, not to mention the emissions from the process, I can only imagine the authors imagine the hydrogen they would need to power the launches would all be coming from renewable energy such as their solar panels cracking it from water.
With that in mind. When the existing solar panels to hydrogen industry has developed and produced the required launch fuel plus maintenance flight fuel ask us again. Also when the necessary space technology has evolved, enabling us to travel to and work at the geo stable locations mentioned. we should look at it again. We can ignore the uptick in reflected solar radiation to the dark side of course, because the sun has no bearing on our Earth’s climate….. apparently.
You never know, maybe our friends in Glasgow have solved the pulsed nuclear launcher technology or maybe they have a secret laser propulsion pusher beam, powered by wind turbines off the western shores of the Shetland Isles….?.
I can’t help thinking I won’t be around at that point in the 22nd century if ever to see it, so maybe it is a concept best described as star gazing….
From the article –
That’s a nice big target for random space junk to smash to bits.
Why not simply cover the near side of the moon with aluminium foil like a Christmas/thanksgiving turkey to increase its albedo? /sarc
I read elsewhere they talk about a sunshine prolongation of 20 minutes only…
I am glad someone mentioned cost. An engineer who doesn’t understand cost accounting is about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
Which increases the energy absorbed by the sun. How is this NOT going to lead to warming?
These schemes always worry me.
Is there a removal plan for when they work too well or if there are unintended negative consequences. I bet there never are.