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?
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.
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.
