A 26-Year-Old Inventor Is Trying To Put Mirrors In Space To Generate Solar Power At Night
Ben Nowack, a 26-year old inventor and CEO of Tons of Mirrors, is trying to use satellite-mounted reflective surfaces to redirect sunlight to earthbound solar panels at night. In an interview with Motherboard, Nowack explains what inspired this idea and how he can turn his concept into reality. Here's an excerpt from the report: What was the initial idea? I had an interesting way to solve the real issue with solar power. It's this unstoppable force. Everybody's installing so many solar panels everywhere. It's really a great candidate to power humanity. But sunlight turns off, it's called nighttime. If you solve that fundamental problem, you fix solar everywhere. Where did the idea come from?I was watching a YouTube video called The Problem with Solar Energy in Africa. It was basically saying that you need three times as many solar panels in Germany as you do in the Sahara Desert and you can't get the power from the Sahara to Germany in an easy way. I thought, what if you could beam the sunlight and then reflect it with mirrors, and put that light into laser beam vacuum tubes that zigzag around the curvature of the Earth. It could be this beam that comes in just like power companies, this tube full of infinite light. That was the initial idea. But the approach was completely economically unworkable. I was like, this is not going to compete with solar in 10 years. I should just completely give up and do something else. Then I was on a run two days later and thought what if I put that thing that turns sunlight into a beam in orbit then you don't have to build a vacuum tube anymore. And it's so much more valuable because you can shine sunlight on solar farms that already exist. Then I developed several more technologies which I know for a fact no one else is working on. That made the model even more economical. Are these just like regular household mirrors, but fixed to a satellite?If you did that, the light would go to too many places. The sun is a certain size. It's not a point, it has a distance across. The light from one side of the sun would bounce off your mirror, and the light from the other side would also bounces off your mirror. If you used a perfectly flat mirror, every single microscopic piece would have this angle of diverging light coming from it. By the time the reflection hit Earth, you'd get a 3.6 kilometer diameter spot, which is gigantic. There are only 10 solar farms that big. So I did the math, and figured out that if I could hit a 500-meter spot instead of a 3,600-meter spot, then I'd be able to hit 44 times more solar sites per orbit.
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