Having driven up to the moors above Buxton last week in the hope of being able to view the Aurora (the hemispheric power was forecast to be 128GW), unfortunately by the time I got there it was too misty to see anything. It did however, get me thinking as to whether we would ever be in a position to develop the technology and the cost being economically viable to harvest solar flares? How likely is this in the future, is it a pipe dream or something that could be a realistic possiblity and if so how far off do you think its likely to be?
Thanks Joanne. I'd also be interested to see what some of our volunteers who work in the 'Space Weather' sector think about this. I've seen various comments before about how technically challenging it would be to do this, but it would be interesting to know if its something on the horizon even if its many years into the future.
Harvesting solar flares is conceptually possible, but technically beyond our current capabilities in a useful, meaningful way. In my opinion, there are many better ways to use the Sun's output at the moment such as solar thermal, solar photovoltaic, biomass, etc which would not require the large scale engineering that harvesting solar flares would.
In addition, there have been many proposals for space-based solar power systems which transmit the energy back to Earth by laser/microwave. I suspect that even these very large schemes would be smaller than systems for generating energy from solar flares.
Maybe once we have established an interplanetary civilisation, we could deploy collectors in space. At the moment, I think we would be well advised to focus more on shielding our rather susceptible terrestrial civilisation from the potentially very serious effects from a massive solar weather incident similar to the Carrington event.
I think what is more important is finding a way to make our energy conversion more efficient, currently it is dreadful around 30-40%, maybe 55% if the waste products i.e. heat can be utilised i.e. CHP etc.
Think about it, the average human can play a game of squash on a slice of Marmite on toast, now that is energy conversion efficiency.
If we can get to within 15% of that efficiency our energy worries would almost vanish.
