Buying energy from the sun?
How could an organization force solar energy to be bought from them? Something like:
A large structure (in space presumably) fully/partly blocks sunlight reaching Earth, so anyone here wishing to unblock a portion must pay the price. Of course this introduces many more problems of heating, lighting, etc., but perhaps the organization is trying to encourage moving to their new off-planet habitat, whatever.
Does this seem plausible? What other scenarios could cause sunlight to be "owned"?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/8673. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
A city planet
Take Coruscant, from Star Wars. It's a planet covered entirely by one large, sprawling, complex city. I'm not sure if there's a canonical reference to how high the tallest buildings are, but from the seeing aerial$^1$ views it looks like they're taller than cities on Earth. Taller buildings mean bigger shadows; bigger shadows means more darkness; more darkness means less area on the ground - if any - to collect solar power.
On a planet covered in one city, the upper levels would become rather valuable, and not just as rooms with views. These rooftops would be the only places where you could gather solar power, because they would effectively drown out all other power-collecting locations. If you own a lot of rooftop space, you can generate a lot of electricity.
However, in a city planet, you'd probably have other sources of electricity, so you'd have to eliminate those before solar became the dominant power source. More to the point, could these panels really provide enough electricity to power the whole city? Perhaps, if there are auxiliary power sources that can't meet the population's demands, so solar is needed to fill the energy gap.
Now we have to figure out why solar is the only option. Here's how I'd eliminate the other sources:
- Nuclear: No nuclear fuels are found in the planet, and they cannot be synthesized
- Fossil fuels: The civilization consumed these long, long, long ago.
- Hydropower: The planet is entirely land, which is why it was easy to cover it in a city. Where was the liquid water? There are some novel solutions to that, such as that the first settlers were extraterrestrial colonists.
- Wind: The city has disrupted wind patterns around it, and nothing more the breezes can exist. Roof-mounted turbines are expensive and are not feasible because of maintenance issues.
$^1$These same scenes show that some areas are open, allowing light to go through, so Coruscant isn't the best example.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads