Have you heard the news out of Hawaii? Former NASA executive and physicist John Mankins captured solar energy from a mountain top in Maui and sent it wirelessly 92 miles to the main island of Hawaii. The team of researchers was only able to send around 20 watts, which is not even enough to power a fluorescent light bulb. Most of the power was lost in the transmission process.

Makins says that the project was limited by budget, and that with the proper equipment he could increase efficiency up to 64%.

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Did you know that 170 million gigawatts of solar energy hit the earth every second? That is more energy than the earth has used since the beginning of the industrial era. Now imagine being able to tap into that source on a large scale. With Mankins wireless energy transfer idea many satellites would be launched with high tech solar panels on them. Then the satellites would relay the energy to earth via harmless wireless energy transfer to receiving stations. Also, with the solar panels in space there is no loss in efficiency due to clouds or night. The energy would be available 24/7.

Mankins says he can get a demonstration system in orbit in around 6 years and have the full system up in around 15 years.

There are scientists in Japan that claim they could get the space-based solar power project started in less than 5 months with less than 1 million dollars. Their concept uses mirrors to focus as much solar power possible into the solar cells, and thus create 5 times more energy than conventional solar cells.

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Let’s get right down to the nuts and bolts of things though.  We would do some actual calculations but it will take some average electric bills plus, how much your state will give for putting power back into the grid, or net metering by solar power.  We will have net metering via other alternative energies later today.

If you are interested in making some money, you can look at this site to get you interested in it, and possibly get you motivated.  That is a buisnessweek article about pioneers getting their foot in the door and how much they made by selling power back.  Remember, it all depends on where you live, because some states do no give a lot of money for net metering.  Here is a website that you can click on each state and it will show you what the actual incentives per state is.  Some of the more liberal conservationist states(i.e. California, Washington, etc) will give a much larger incentive then others.

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The system relies on solar panels to provide energy during the day when the sun is available, and it borrows a small amount of power from the panels to split water into its basic parts: hydrogen and oxygen. Then, at night when the sun has gone down and the panels are no longer producing power, it combines the stored hydrogen and oxygen over a fuel cell to create electricity. Power during the day or night. What is so great about this system? It is energy that is almost free. If a homeowner were to have an all electric car, she could recharge the batteries with energy produced right at home. No more trips to the gas station. In addtion the scientists working on the system say that they are designing it to be closed, meaning that you would put water into it once and it would hum away creating electricity for the duration of its lifetime. This is exciting stuff.

There are still hurdles to overcome, but technologies like this are just the kind of thing the world needs right now. Information about the scientists (Daniel Nocera and Matthew Kanan) and the technology can be found all over the internet as this has been a hot topic over the last few weeks. This Wikipedia page is a good start.

See a video interview with Daniel here.

Consider that there is hope and there will still be light tomorrow–if, that is, people continue to work toward a better future.