Blown Away by … the Sun?

Some days I feel as if the wind might just pick me up and carry me away, especially with these Nor’easters that keep roaring through New England, causing power outages here, there, and everywhere!

When several parts of my hometown lost power during Spring Break, bitter yet covetous remarks about “those darn generators” seemed to pass someone’s lips every day. But to really make your neighbors green with envy just pop a wind turbine in the backyard and let those 40 mph winds keep your lights on and fridge humming!

As another of our high-profile green energy celebs, wind power tends to hang with the same gang as solar. In fact, not only do solar power and wind power share the gig for clean energy poster child, but also the secret ingredient to clean energy: the Sun!

See, it turns out that the Sun tends to play favorites when heating up different parts of our atmosphere, forming hot and cold spots and yielding pressure differences. And since gases do not seem to enjoy stress any more than the next college student, air molecules migrate en masse from high pressure to low pressure spots. This flow of gases around Earth is what we know as wind!

But true solar wind makes these Nor’easters seem like child’s play, as it whizzes by at gobsmacking speeds of 1 million miles per hour! Even our worst tornadoes don’t come anywhere near cracking 400 mph!

Photo from NASA Goddard Space Flight.

So, who exactly is this speedy new kid on the block?

Akin to Earth and its atmosphere, the Sun is rocking a “corona” or what effectively boils down to a gaggle of gases and charged particles that gravity lets hang out around the Sun. But these particles push the limits of hot, reaching scorching temperature of 2 million degrees Fahrenheit! Therefore, even the gravity of an object as massive as our Sun (the same force that can keep eight planets, plus Pluto, in line!) can’t seem to keep a grip on these particles in this extreme-sports version of hot potato! And as soon as these slippery particles dodge gravity, they zoom away in every direction at absurdly high speeds.

Of course, this means these lethally radioactive magnetic clouds and charged particles constantly whiz through space toward us. But Earth’s magnetic field has our back, deflecting these deadly solar winds!

But even though Earth’s plain-Jane wind might not have that wow-factor that solar wind boasts, why don’t we just stick to the status-quo?

Well, our status-quo is far from perfect!

Photo by Steve P.

For one, wind is fickle and unpredictable. Just like solar, wind energy is a part-time hand. But solar at least gave us notice that it took night breaks. Wind, on the other hand, is that employee that just skips work on a whim!

And to complicate matters, although feasible for residential use, wind turbines make obnoxious house guests. Not only do these looming monstrosities stick out like a sore thumb, but turbines also chatter at a noisy 50-60 decibels!

Wind turbines can also pose a danger to different ecosystems, particularly any flying species, and may subliminally inspire tree clearing for the sake of wind farms.

And wind energy by itself simply can’t cut it. It is neither efficient nor widely-used enough to offer us enough power, that is, without the help of those evil fossil fuels.

According to scientists at Washington State University however, if we were to harness solar wind, it would be able to generate 1 billion billion gigawatts of energy (and no, the double billion isn’t a typo)! This is about 100 billion times the power that Earth uses today. Talk about go big or go home!

But a wind turbine in space is difficult to imagine, not to mention to bring into being. And actually, since solar wind is so different from wind on Earth, a windmill just would not do the trick. Instead, scientists whipped up this quick recipe:

All you need is…

1. A satellite.

2. A bunch of charged copper wire and a magnetic field to catch those speedy electrons in solar wind! (This is the secret ingredient to generate energy!)

3. And for the finishing touch: a solar sail. Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a Washington State astronomy professor, piloting this cutting-edge research, has his heart set on a 5,220-mile-wide model (to generate that billion billion gigawatts), but a modest sail of 32.8 feet plus just shy of 1,000 feet of copper wire should yield enough energy for 1,000 homes.

Just wind this copper wire through a solar sail, plop it onto your handy-dandy satellite, and fling it up to space. And voilá! Energy from solar wind!

Of course, there is just one teeny-tiny part missing. Otherwise, we surely would have gotten on with pumping out those gigawatts already!

We just seem to forget that this satellite will orbit the Sun, and that is just a wee-bit further than a hop, a skip, and a step away from us here on Earth. So how do we get all this juice 90-some million miles back to Earth?

Our current idea is to use an ultra-intense infrared laser, but this technology is just not up to speed yet. Plus, there is this contraption’s complex engineering to consider.

So, solar wind might not put our everyday turbines out of the market anytime soon, but it is certainly a promising (and uber-cool) renewable of the future!