Satellite Solar Power Demonstrated Between Hawaii Islands

If you remember, not a long time ago we had an article talking about NASA’s plans to send a satellite to space which could capture pure Sun energy and resend it to Earth in the form of microwaves.

Now, the former manager of NASA’s Exploration Systems Research and Technology Program and co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Managed Energy Technologies LLC, John C. Mankins, has made an experiment in which he performs wireless power transmission between two islands in Hawaii. The cool fact is that the islands are situated at 92 miles (148km) of each other, a distance higher than the altitude of a satellite performing this task in space. The Japanese also tinker with this kind of experiment, but they want to transmit the energy through lasers.

From the press release: “The project demonstrated wireless power transmission between two Hawaiian islands 148 kilometers apart, more than the distance from the surface of Earth to the boundary of space. It will be featured in an hour-long special that evening on Discovery Channel as part of DISCOVERY PROJECT EARTH, an eight-part series on the most ambitious geo-engineering ideas to tackle global climate change and the need for new and sustainable energy sources.”

As I said in the previous article about this subject, this is an interesting project, with high green perspectives. The question is who will use it first: the army, or the civilians? Sometimes, the idea of free and unlimited energy scares me because of its potential as a weapon, and not as a renewable energy resource.

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