Solar Ring
All fashionable planets have rings. It’s time that Earth has one of it’s own. The fundamental idea is fairly simple: anchored to the earth by space elevators at the north and south poles, a ring of solar panels will spin to face the sun year-round. The energy provided by the ring will be brought down the elevator in hydrogen cells and beamed directly to power stations by Tesla transmissions. This is not fanciful science-fiction: such a project is within our reach. It is not unreasonable to expect this project to be running by the year 2015.

Solar Power
A ring of solar panels one meter wide, with a 135 million meter circumference and 10 percent energy efficiency would provide 18 gigawatts, twenty-four hours a day. That’s equivalent to 18 nuclear power plants. And once the original ring is up, extra rings will be easy to add. A ring that is one kilometer wide would provide the entire global energy needs expected by the year 2018. And of course that’s assuming current technologies in solar panels; further developments will considerably increase the amount of this energy we can gather directly from our primal source: the Sun.

Space Elevator
NASA and many other national and private companies are already working on engineering space elevators that would be similar to the ones that would make this possible. Carbon nanotubes, for instance, have recently made the idea of a cable elevator more practical than ever. A modified, propulsion-based elevator could be used at the poles to carry self assembling construction and maintenance machines and solar panels into space. With the ring assembled, the elevator can be used to ferry hydrogen cells to be charged in space as well as carrying charge on the cables themselves.

Getting Involved
Nobody, as far as we know, is working on this project yet. But you can. There are engineering problems to be solved, national and international agreements to be made, and of course, the problem of funding. But none of these are insurmountable, and the benefits to be gained far outweigh the problems to be overcome. This is an open source project; if you would like to learn more, get involved, or take up the project yourself, please go to www.solarring.org. We can do it.