Yeah, subtext 3 is a major drawback, still Phantom's vacuum pipe idea would work well, since a non-ridgid route of transfer isn't really that important for really long distances. You could make a partial vacuum in the laser pipe without using any extra energy if you simply used the wind turbine's (it's wind energy i'm thinking of transferring) negative pressure to cause a suction effect in front of the pipe. This wouldn't be as efficient as a complete vacuum, but it would be a lot cheaper.

An excimer laser using the excimer Krypton Flouride as a reagent seems to be the most efficient UV laser I could find. I want a UV laser because that would minimize loss due to heat (while infared would maximize it) in the laser during transer. Excimer lasers are the type of laser used in Lasix surgery, so I think the technology would be pretty cheap and easy to aquire. Excimer lasers are also nice because the only reaction they require is the electric excitement of an excimer like Krypton Flouride. I'm not sure how abundant Krypton Flouride is, or at what rate the laser reaction uses it up, so alternatively you could use Pyrene, also an excimer, which is a very abundant coal byproduct. I'm not sure how efficient Pyrene is though.

Pyro, thanks for showing some positive interest in this post, I encourage you to find some of your own topics to talk about if your interested in this sort of thing, I really enjoy speculating on them.

If you are transforming laser beams into useful electricity, you would be better off with an IR laser, because then you simply need to convert thermal energy to electrical energy.

Also, I did not mean to suggest that vacuum tubes would actually be useful at large sizes, as you'd need to be making something of the same scale of a supercollider. However, a noble gas would be fine, though now you're talking about a LOT of gass.

No, laser power is fine for space and maybe straight lines, but even point-to-point microwave beaming is better on the surface. Copper's pretty great, though I think that it would be better to redesign the way we generate power, moving from single large generators to lots of smaller ones.

Also, embracing nuclear power. Ideally the more plentiful thorium, rather than the expensive uranium.
But that's honestly a better thing to read about on a real science site.

The reason I thought of this laser power in the first place was because I wanted something that wouldnt lose energy with distance like electricity does. The reason I wanted that is because I thought that exploiting the windieness of some remote windy areas and using tidal power in remote seas which are ussually too far away to give energy (due to resistance loss in cables) could be useful for suplementing untapped energy.


I don't believe, like some people, that nuclear is terrible because one poorly constructed 1986 soviet plant broke down, but I do dislike it because using it would be trying to solve our unsustainable resource problem by using another unsustainable resource, uranium and thorium. There is also the problem of nuclear waste. Although I have heard that they can recycle nuclear waste to some extent, this recycled waste will still have to be stored for a very long time before it loses radioactivity.

I think nuclear power might be a good transitional power, because it's efficient and non-pollutive, but I hope that people won't come to rely on it, when they start using it, and not put enough effort into developing more sustainable energies.

British joke heard recently:
Q: What's the difference between nuclear proliferation in Iran and nuclear proliferation in the US?
A: I don't know, what IS the difference between nuclear proliferation in Iran and nuclear proliferation in the US?
Q: ...Exactly.

Nuclear power has a bad rap, especially because we decided to use uranium on the basis that it produces weaponizable leftovers (Convenient for the Cold War era, not so great anymore).
There are a few other fissible elements that (when used in a breeder reactor) have nothing left over at all, and cost less to run and maintain than a college sports team.

However, I think we have to face the facts and agree that whatever else we do, the human race has simply grown too large.
How to solve that practically and ethically is going to be a big question soon.
My home is one of the greenest in the neighborhood, and it's still not sustainable.
Imagine the rest of the world's population trying to live with all the conveniences we associate with modern western life.
We've just not got that sort of raw material.

I'm a second-year optical/electrical engineering double major, so I'd like to think that I know something about this.

I'm not familiar with the efficiency of converting electric to optic power and back again, though I'd imagine that doing so twice would represent a significant loss of power.

There are basically two methods of energy transfer that I can think of for this: transmitting light through a fixed medium using fiber-optic technology, and beaming the energy to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit and reflecting it down to a receiver station. In the latter case, you'd probably want to use microwaves in order to maximize efficiency; radio waves can't be controlled well and don't have enough power behind them, and anything with a shorter wavelength will be absorbed by the atmosphere. It's most efficient for locations near the equator, on account of moving through less atmosphere, and the power lost would be ideally constant for a given latitude, as you can reflect the microwaves among satellites as much as you want. Still, high-power microwave beams going to 36000 km above the Earth and back can be quite dangerous for airborne objects and lower orbiting satellites, though the 100 km of atmosphere wouldn't bleed off too much energy. So it's efficient, but you'd have to work out a lot in terms of safety.

The former method of using fiber-optic technology probably wouldn't work. I don't know of any way to do it without fiber-optics, though I'm also not familiar with how the technology would work. I'm not sure what wavelength would be best for keeping a high power while minimizing loss within the cable; you'd probably want to stay within current used wavelengths in order to minimize costs, as developing and producing km of new optical fiber would be quite an investment. The problem here is, even given the decades of optimization so far, there is significant loss of intensity over long distances. We've gotten the impurities down to a few parts per billion and we still need signal boosters every few km. For high-power beams, the energy lost would probably damage the cable anyway. Having a

Given the cost of researching, developing, and producing this technology, it's probably a lot more efficient to just build a lower-efficiency power plant near where you need it rather than go to the effort of beaming it from somewhere else. Still, the satellite method could easily be reconfigured to beam the energy to other satellites or a moon station in the future, or just another receiver station. It's basically just the microwave power plants beck in the SimCity series, which could also take advantage of getting energy from outside the atmosphere, which is pretty darn efficient in the first place. Personally, I'm all for nuclear power; it's location inspecific, efficient, clean, and lasts a while. Once we get the startup costs of developing how to design one paid off (which, I'm given to understand, is the primary reason why we haven't been building any), it wouldn't take much more effort to build a lot more. I'd like to think that safety procedures would have improved over the past few decades, so it would be safe.

Vacuum cables just wouldn't work very well. You can't use fiber-optics, you'd need a pretty darn pure vacuum if you're transmitting over a long distance, the cable would need to be quite sturdy in order to support the pressure differential, a single fault would ruin the entire cable, and producing a cable as long as you'd need with a perfectly reflective surface for whatever wavelength you're transmitting would be difficult indeed. A rigid design would be wholly impractical over long distances; a single tectonic shift, and it's ruined. Getting the surface of the inner tube as smooth as would be required to avoid absorption would also be prohibitive.

Getting specific numbers would take a group of engineers a very long time; I doubt that research on the subject has been carried through to the point where we can give any sort of concrete number.

Check back in the summer, after I take semiconductor and laser physics.