There’s a report on CNN.com about India’s energy troubles. The article focuses on a guy named Pranav Mehta who has suggested that instead of building coal power plants in India they should instead put solar panels into space and beam the energy down. This would apparently be a lot more efficient than coal energy so in the long run India would probably benefit greatly if they were the first country to be able to do this.

Correct me if I’m wrong here but hasn’t wireless electricity been possible since Nikola Tesla? I thought the problem wasn’t so much the technological difficulties but the health concerns of being megawatts of energy through the air, and you know, buildings and people too. I’m certainly not an electrical engineer or anything but it just doesn’t sound safe. It doesn’t seem to me that electricity could be transmitted on something similar to a radio frequency.

Still, this would be nice if it were truly feasible. The article says that you could use one kilometer of solar panels and generate power equal to all the coal plants in the world at the moment. That’s pretty impressive. It’s a pretty win-win for the environment and the advancement of civilization as well. I think until it’s proven that beaming enormous amounts of electricity through thin air we should stick to Richard Branson’s idea of storing computer systems in space so that we wouldn’t have to beam energy down, we’d just beam the information superhighway down.