Solar Wind Could Replace Solar, Wind as Renewable Energy Source | Popular Science

Solar Wind Could Replace Solar, Wind as Renewable Energy Source | Popular Science

Never mind using the solar wind to power spacecraft — that’s old hat. Scientists at Washington State University want to use solar wind to power the entire world. A humongous solar sail could be used to harvest the power of solar winds, generating 1 billion billion gigawatts of electricity. The problem is figuring out how to get the power back to Earth.

A solar wind power satellite, or a Dyson-Harrop satellite, after the scientists who invented it, would provide 100 billion times as much power as the Earth currently uses, as Discovery News points out. Researchers from Washington State University published a paper describing the system in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

It involves a .4-inch-wide copper wire pointed at the sun, and attached to a solar sail. The wire — which can range in length from 980 feet to more than half a mile — would generate a magnetic field that would capture electrons from the solar wind. The particles would be funneled into a spherical receiver, which produces a current.