Scenario: Aliens gift humanity some mega power plant that runs off a black hole or some shit. Maybe it’s a quantum time battery or perpetual motion machine, whatever.
If we plopped it somewhere on Earth, could humanity build infrastructure across the globe to provide everyone with near unlimited clean electricity?
the sun
A staple of Sci-fi like Star Trek is that not just power generation, but storage and transmission are also trivial. They have any number of ways to transmit energy across large distances, between ships etc.
As an example, this already exists: In a First, Caltech’s Space Solar Power Demonstrator Wirelessly Transmits Power in Space
I imagine one of the ways for planet level energy generation would be solar panels in space and transmitting to earth somehow. I don’t know whether that is feasible IRL anytime in the next 200 years but in a “sci fi setting” its probably the most reasonable idea that is not just “magic” IMO.
So maybe one realy big solar panel array, or a planet wide coverage of many smaller arrays coordinated for sharing load with dozens of transmission points down to Earth would be my solution to your question.
The two biggest problems would be getting that much power out of a single spot and getting power to really remote places. Running power cables to Hawaii would be a huge pain in the ass, for example. Zoift’s suggestion of manufacturing hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2 is a perfectly legitimate way of “transferring” power.
The current total electricity consumption of earth is something like 24 petawatt-hours per year, making for an average rate of something close to 3 terawatts. To transmit that kind of power in one place you’d need a bus bar with a cross sectional area of something like 4,000 square meters, a bit more than 60 meters on the short sides. This is such a big bus bar that it doesn’t really make sense, we’re talking about a block of solid copper bigger than most buildings. I expect we’d have to do some wacky superconductor shenanigans or something to actually do the initial distribution to branch lines.
I expect we’d have to do some wacky superconductor shenanigans or something to actually do the initial distribution to branch lines.
Nah we’d boil water to spin turbines on a long steam pipe lol. It’s a proven technology and way less difficult than manufacting superconductors with no defects in bulk and keeping them cold.
That would be an alarmingly large steam pipe but I don’t know enough about steam pipes to say exactly how alarmingly large
Only to spread out the energy for use. Hydraulic and steam power has been routed through cities in the past which is a more complex problem.
I suspect you’d be quite surprised at how much energy you can push through a pipe carrying steam. It’s the fundamental technology behind most powerplants. Steam in a pipe can easily handle Gigawatts in nuclear powerplants.
Getting energy out of anything concentrated is hard, but steam is cheap and holds a lot of energy.
need a bus bar with a cross sectional area of something like 4,000 square meters
At what voltage? China has 1.2MV lines already, and if power were free that number could surely go higher even with efficiency losses.
I was assuming 765kV lines
If my very loose math on your loose math is accurate, current superconductor wackiness levels (best available critical current density) would take that down to 40 square meters, so 6 meters a side, which would still be quite a lot. Eyeballing the current standard for big plants, looks like they’re using like forearm-length-wide tubular busbars, so this is quite a lot more massive. But there’s also the possibility of transformer magic happening to reduce that amperage.
40 square meters of YBCO sounds even more daunting than 4000 square meters of copper in some ways. Might have to ask them kindly generator aliens for some better superconductors while they’re at it.
Yeah. If you have a magic generator, you can pretty much do whatever.
Powerlines work really well all things considered, esp if you dont have to care about transmission losses. You could run an atmospheric processor to crack C0² and water back into hydrocarbon fuels and run a carbon-neutral ICE engine. If you wanna get scifi with it (and really dont give a shit about losses) you can beam power with masers and rectennas.
Unless of course it was destroyed in the fight to control it, or as an act of sabotage to avoid undervaluing barrels of oil or whatever.
One concept I’ve pondered is having superconducting transmission lines. It would be complex and expensive, but not completely infeasible with an infinite energy generator I guess. Really depends on where the generator gets placed though. If it was in orbit, you could just have it beam down microwaves to distribution stations. The stations would have some batteries or capacitors or something, so they could keep operating when out of range/line-of-sight.
I guess you could have orbital substations to spread the beams around the world evenly, so you don’t have to have so much storage at each terrestrial station. That’s probably the better sci-fi solution.
