With low startup costs, I think I know a way to harness a limitless supply of "free" energy. Is it workable?

Question

It requires two rings of satellites in orbit. The inner ring would be geostationary & transmit its generated energy to a surface relay station, it ability to transmit automatically shut off if it fails to receive the feedback signal from the relay station that tells it it's still properly aligned (wouldn't want a trail of scorched earth if one of them happened to drift off course).

The outer band would consist of copper-bearing satellites set to orbit in the opposite direction and as quickly as possible.

In short, spinning magnetic field + metal surrounding it = electricity. The only way it would possibly run out is if the Earth stopped spinning on its axis, in which event we'd have more than energy needs to worry about.

I call this a "Faraday Belt". Would it work?

Tens of millions of dollars each? I think not. We launch satellites every day, businesses and small corporations do it frequently. Seeing as how we're willing to put up dozens of satellites so people watch their sports and their playboy channel, I hardly think this would be an unreasonable purpose for such an endeavor. And why would they only have to launch one at a time? :-?

Answer 1

nope, won't work.

In order to use this to generate electricity the system would have to orbit very close to the stationary elements and would have to be one virtually continuous loop to generate any meaningful energy. Also, the resistance generated by the the inner ring as it produced power would slow the orbits of the outer ring, requiring some system to maintain their speed. This would probably take at least as much energy as it would generate, so there's really no net gain for a huge expense.

Neat idea, just not feasible or practical.

Answer 2

Problems:
- Cost of satellites rings
- How much copper paylaod will a satellite handle
- How would you transfer that energy (electricity converted into microwaves?) back to earth at a high intensity?

A thought but workable only on Sci-Fi. We are certainly not there yet

Answer 3

What would happen to an airplane that flies through your return beams? pfffffffttt maybe? :)

Beaming microwave radiation back to the earth has been looked at and there is a great deal of information available on the web to show you the thought process and the problems.

Isn't it much easier (and cheaper) to make some tidal or wind generators?? :)

Good luck...

Answer 4

Did your calculation of "low startup costs" include the expense of launching all of those satellites at tens of millions of dollars each?