If we want to maintain the standard of living developed countries are used to and if developing countries are able to adopt this standard, we’re going to need more energy than we can capture and use using available technologies. Here’s a pretty cool way to get around the problem:

Solar power from both the Moon and from satellites would provide energy for operations in space and could be beamed down to Earth using either lasers or microwaves. The great advantage of beamed power is that it does not have to be transmitted across the giant transcontinental grids as it done today. Multiple solar power satellites, along with a large set of arrays on the Moon, would be the basis of a system that would be far more robust and reliable than our current one, which suffers from occasional blackouts such as the one suffered along the US East Coast in August 2003, or the terrorist campaign that is being carried out today against the Iraqi electricity grid.

It is expensive, but it would help with our energy problem in a relatively clean way and we’d probably make a lot of cool discoveries setting stuff up on the moon.

Via 3QD.