Comment by hdjrudni
10 hours ago
Is that more or less absurd than making deals with our neighbours to share their electricity? Build some solar farms around the planet and then distribute it over wire.
I honestly don't know the answer. I know there's some efficiency loss running over long wires too but I don't know what's more realistic.
In theory you can do HVDC over long distances. In practice that doesn't help much. Power would normally want to run north to south (not gonna do HVDC across the oceans anytime soon), and so the terminator hits you at the same time everywhere. It's got to be batteries if you want PV at scale.
The practical difficulties aren't really long distance transmission though. They're political and engineering. Spain had a massive blackout recently because a PV farm in the south west developed a timing glitch and they couldn't control the grid frequency - that nearly took out all of Europe and the power wasn't even being transmitted long distance! The level of trust you need to build a giant integrated continent-wide power grid is off the charts and it's not clear it's sustainable over the long run. E.g. the EU threatened to cut Britain's electricity supplies during Brexit as a negotiating tactic and that wasn't even war.
HVDC would be a lot less connected than an AC grid.
The real question is, why do you expect Space to have fewer political and engineering issues.
The political issues in space are mostly launch related, right? Once you have the birds up nobody cares about anything except space junk and bandwidth. They're getting experience of solving those with Starlink already. And if you can find a way to put the satellites really far out there's plenty of space - inferencing satellites don't need to be close to Earth, low latency chat stuff can stay on the ground and the flying servers can just do batch.
The politics on the ground is much harder. Countries own the land, you need lots of permits, electricity generation is in contest with other uses.
There is absolutely nothing realistic about power transmission from space to earth, wired or wireless.