Icarus and iPhones
A bi-weekly collection of stories about climate infrastructure around the world
The Caltech Space Solar Power Project (SSPP) is launching a Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD). It will test three delicious sounding technologies:
DOLCE (Deployable on-Orbit ultraLight Composite Experiment): testing the deployment mechanism of the solar array.
MAPLE (Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment): testing the wireless power transmission from space back to earth.
ALBA: testing which photovoltaic panels work best in outer space.
The project is funded by billionaire and trustee of Caltech, Donald Bren. The philanthropist learned about the potential of space solar in the magazine Popular Science and approached the president of the university to fund the endeavor. At least this is the official public relations narrative.
If collecting solar rays from outer space and microwaving the power back to earth sounds like a premise of a sci-fi movie, it might be because it is literally the premise of a 2002 James Bond flick. In Die Another Day, a billionaire launches a space solar power array named Icarus and tries to use the collected sunshine power to… you guessed it, microwave James Bond.
Constructing destruction in Luetzerath
Germany has decided to expand a coal mine; and the images inspire what I can only expect to be an imminent Cixin Liu sci-fi series of humans who glared into the eye of the machine and consequently discovered their own extinction.
As the war in Ukraine enters its second year, energy security remains on the forefront of European politics. Russia, which supplies approximately 20 percent of European energy, has continued to either threaten or fully cut off its natural gas exports.
Half of Germany’s natural gas powering industrial fields, homes, and schools comes from Russian fields in Siberia. Olaf Schulz, whose government has been at the forefront of environmental transition and the draftee of the European Green New Deal, has been forced to decide between relying ever more on Russian supplies or finding alternative sources of power. Considering that wind and solar capacity takes at least 2 years to develop fully, many German politicians have demanded a fast alternative, which will necessarily be fossil fuels.
Luetzerath, a small town in Western Germany, has been selected as a site for a new coal mine intending to fill the time gap.
Some early activists have been there for at least six months, inhabiting the town’s final holdout: a quaint family farm, or just sleeping in tents in the area. That farm has long since been destroyed, and now the barren, sandy fields are home to angry protesters, German police getting stuck in the mud, burning barricades, activists glued to roads (old news, I know), and probably dozens of drones recording this disturbingly captivating destruction.
The brilliant irrigation method of western China
The Western parts of China, particularly Xinjiang, are some of the driest in the world (and are deserts below sea level). All natural rainfall and above-ground reservoirs quickly evaporate.
In response to the harsh conditions, the indigenous citizens of Xinjiang, Uyghurs, have maintained an intricate, hand-carved system of underground aqueducts for more than 2,000 years.
The Karez System (كارىز) originates in snowcapped mountains and flows deep underground through the network of tunnels that stretch between 3 to 25 kilometers long to reach households and agricultural fields. The ingenuity lies in the tunnel's co-engineering with the surrounding environmental — sloping with the elevation to carry water with ease. Because the water runs underground, it’s protected from evaporation and dust-storm sediment, ensuring consistent water quality.
This hydrological engineering project is often compared to the Great Wall and the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal. Similar systems exist in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan.
Due to water pollution, oil drilling, and industrial wells, only 300 of the original 600 Karez aqueducts are still in active use. Much of this infrastructure was replaced by concrete canals, ditches, and industrial wells.
For the last decade, from DC to Beijing, firms have claimed that mobile devices will become revolutionary extensions of our infrastructure. Until very recently, getting consistent and reliable data about roads, bridges, or electrical towers with one’s handheld device stopped at the camera: an algorithm compared new pictures with old pictures and spotted cracks, tears, or leaks.
Now, MIT released a study, which notes,
“data collected by smartphones in moving vehicles under real-world conditions can be used to identify structural modal properties of a bridge, information which is vital to condition assessments and damage detection frameworks.”
This is almost as impressive as reconstructing an image of a room from a crinkled chip bag, or reassembling the sound waves of a conversation from a silent video of a vibrating plant.
This is all to say that data collection and recovery is astounding. Don’t bother putting on your tin foil hat, it’ll make both listening to your conversations and checking in on the health of your natural gas pipelines just that much easier.