(05-13-2019, 07:34 PM)classicdrogn Wrote: A solar shade made of photovoltaic panels would be pretty good, except how do you get the power down? Microwave beaming seems less than ideal if the goal is to reduce the amount of energy reaching the planet, and either way it's a stupidly huge amount of material to launch and deploy even if you can paint the cells onto mylar film or something. (Can we even do that? I know flexible solar cells are kind of a thing, but there's a lot of fiction contamination in that part of my memory.)So, the thing about using microwaves to move the power down is that it hopefully displaces some of the high carbon baseline generating capacity so that even with losses to microwave heating you're still taking on less solar heating. Also, it's kind of a terrible transmission system if you're losing a lot to microwave heating, so there is a strong incentive to avoid that since you'd be throwing money or your other generic resource of choice away in the form of cooked birds or whatever. Never mind that the schemes all call for staying just under the exposure limits for microwave anyway, so if it wasn't safe then those regulations should probably be rewritten too.
And you use the mylar film sections as solar concentrators to much smaller solar arrays rated for higher exposure levels. Mirrors that are good to a 'close enough' standard are much lighter than finicky things like solar panels.
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