Technology is progressing so fast that something like space based solar or fusion power will replace terrestrial solar within 100 years.
I don’t think microwave beaming is ever viable
Most fusion concepts are thermal power plants. Those have inherent downsides that have nothing to do with the nuclear energy providing the heat for the steam turbines. So they will never fully replace renewables. Helion’s concept might work. But that remains to be seen.
Taking out the rogue orbital power station would be a competition between very trigger happy militaries. Who wouldn't want to demonstrate their satellite killers on a legitimate target?
And why wouldn’t one of those powers be the ones installing such an installation in the first place?
A non trivial problem if whatever is on the ground trying to launch is being heated white hot by a maser, no?
And getting there has non trivial flight time too, plenty of time for it to be melted on its way.
Orbit is the ‘high ground’.
So what about this orbiting duck of yours, the power station recently turned rogue?
Look, the satellites you share an orbit with are adjusting their trajectories to intercept yours. Undisturbed, they will pose collision hazards within the next days. You must fry them all before they complete the adjustments. Do you have a real time feed of their position for targeting? Bet you do, you're a supervillain after all.
But some satellites are passing behind earth, they will complete their manouvers before they emerge from earth's shadow. The first hit is predicted in just 130 hours.
But hey a bunch of missiles took off on the other side of earth, they are now on a ballistic trajectory that intercepts your station's orbit. Thanks to your flawless targeting, you manage to melt some of them. Their debris will hit anyway, your station has 19 minutes left before impact.
Meanwhile, some subs poke laser scopes out of the sea, taking shots at your station. You divert your energy from the incoming missiles, but when you try to hit one, the scope is submerged again. You produce a plume of steam.
And what is this? What was supposedly a radar array starts to beam microwaves your way. Your station overheats in seconds because it has almost no mass and lots of surface. You could've taken out maybe one of the hundreds of antennas in the array if your comms hadn't already been crippled by a laser.
As you lift your gaze from the now useless controls, the sky is lit by a tactical nuke that was hiding in a spy satellite. It happened to be close enough for a crippling EMP blow.
Fin.
And any significant orbital power station is going to have to be pretty big. Or it’s pretty pointless.
Which means it’s going to have a lot of mass.
It's an often used qualifier to dodge what can turn out to be meritless predictions. Just long enough into the future to sound promising, but also far enough into the future to not tempt a need for supporting evidence.
In my view if we don't have the underpinnings or motivation today to support such forward looking statements, then there is no genuine foundation for claiming that the situation will improve merely as time moves on. Technology only comes about when we make it, and only develops rapidly when there is a significant motivation for putting serious manpower behind it.
One could just as easily say that we'll have small and portable fusion reactors that completely satisfy our energy needs.
Please enough of them far away from Earth and you get pretty much unlimited energy all year round.
A solar panel in space would be highly efficient.
Even if you can turn 100% of the energy you received from space into electricity, in the end it'll all turn to heat.
Also keep in mind that cooling the hot part of your space heat pump is very limited: there's no convection nor conduction in space. You can only lose heat energy via radiation or ablation (= shooting away hot pieces).
Almost no matter what machine you are powering, be it a a toaster or a computer or an electric car or a washing machine, eventually turns all of the electric energy into heat.
(You can contrive some counter-examples. Eg if you point a sufficiently strong laser pointer at the sky, some of the energy will escape earth before turning into heat here.)
When land becomes the limiting factor on earth.
Assuming the worst-case predictions of climate change come true, there will be more than enough desert capacity along the equatorial areas to provide power for the rest.
What makes you think so? There's always more you can do with more energy. 'Never' is a long time. And there are opportunity costs from other uses you could put land on earth to.
You are right that it will be a while before remote corners on earth become more expensive than space for solar power generation. But not 'never'.
(Btw, if you think really big, the limit for how much power we can use on earth is given by how much waste heat we can radiate into space.
At some point, you don't want to keep beaming down energy from space into earth, even if you somehow could convert 100% of the received power into electricity with no losses: because at the end all the electrical power used will still turn into heat. Heat that we will have to get rid of.
At that point in time, you might want to use the electricity directly in space, eg to run data centres there, and just beam the results of the computations down.)
> Assuming the worst-case predictions of climate change come true, there will be more than enough desert capacity along the equatorial areas to provide power for the rest.
While climate change might become unpleasant, I have no clue what it has to do with any of this? The surface of the earth will stay roughly constant and so will its orbit, and the sun will shine regardless of what happens on earth. (And I assume that if you wanted to badly enough, you could easily float solar panels on top of the ocean; at least easier than blasting them into space.)
The entire world's power supply could be met by sacrificing just 3.27% of the US [1]. The Sahara desert is already economically useless as it is completely and utterly inhospitable, unable to support life beyond a few shrubs, insects and felines.
> While climate change might become unpleasant, I have no clue what it has to do with any of this?
Simple, the amount of desertified space will grow, and so space that is now unusable for solar power because it can actually be used at the moment can then be used for power.
[1] https://www.axionpower.com/knowledge/power-world-with-solar/
So? We can always grow our energy consumption to meet supply.
> Simple, the amount of desertified space will grow, and so space that is now unusable for solar power because it can actually be used at the moment can then be used for power.
The oceans are a lot bigger than all the deserts put together.