I guess when you’re a small country it pays to think big.

Japan is aiming to collect solar power in space and zap it down to Earth using laser beams or microwaves.

It involves an array of photovoltaic dishes, reaching across several square miles, that hover in geostationary orbit outside the Earth’s atmosphere.

The solar cells would capture the sun’s energy, which is at least five times stronger in space than on Earth, and beam it down to the ground through clusters of lasers or microwaves.

It’s not a new idea, solar power satellite have been on the drawing boards at least since the 1970’s, what’s new is seeing a major economic power commit to exploring the idea. It’s understandable why japan would like to do it, though. They’ve always had to depend on imports for energy, a series of solar power satellites would go a long way towards making Japan self-sufficient.

It’s worth keeping in mind that solar energy does not necessarily mean the big energy companies go away.

A $400 billon (£240 billion) plan to provide Europe with solar power from the Sahara desert moved a step closer to reality with the formation of a consortium of 12 companies to carry out the work. Known as the Desertec Industrial Initiative (DDI), the German-led consortium consists of some of country’s biggest engineering and power companies, along with Munich Re, the largest reinsurer in the world.

The DDI believes it can deliver solar power to Europe as early as 2015. It aims to provide 15% of Europe’s electricity by 2050 or earlier via power lines stretching across the desert and Mediterranean Sea.

That’s a pretty big goal. If they pull it off, though, the whole project could become a model for others to follow, and show other big energy companies how to stay in the game after coal, oil, and gas are gone.

Sometime it seems like you can barely get anyone in this country to agree on anything, which makes these numbers all the more astonishing.

An amazingly high percentage of people who live down the Mid-Atlantic Seaboard from New York to Virginia want wind turbines off their coast.

Even if they can be seen from the shoreline, 67 percent support off-shore wind power, according to a new poll of coastal residents of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia .

If the turbines are out of sight, the level of support goes up to an astounding 82 percent.

The potential energy from wind off the Atlantic Coast would serve up to a third of the population of the United States. That, put together with people’s evident willingness to support such an endeavor, have to make the installation of wind turbines there a project well worth pursuing.

Via Grist, here’s an idea that illustrates the kind of innovative thinking that just might get us out of our energy problems and take our infrastructure out of the nineteenth century and in to the twenty-second.

The notion is to replace paved surfaces with rugged, specially built solar panels.

The Solar Road Panels would contain not just solar panels but LED lighting (to enable real-time communication with drivers), heating units (to prevent icing), high-voltage power transmission lines, and even electric-vehicle recharging stations. It’s transportation, power, and grid infrastructure in the same place.

At the limit, if all paved surfaces in the U.S. were replaced with 15% efficiency solar panels, the resulting distributed power network could provide three times the electricity the nation consumes, with zero carbon emissions and no additional power grid infrastructure. (Yes, I’m aware manufacturing, installing, and maintaining it would generate emissions, as with any infrastructure project.)

One of the problems with large-scale technological innovation is that we have become so accustomed to our current ways of doing things that metaphorical roadblocks are put in the way of anything that would change the infrastructure and energy transmission structure that we now use. Yet in order to break out of the trap of pollution and centralized, monopolistic energy structure now in place is going to require some really new ideas. Solar Roadways may or may not prove to be that kind of structure changing idea, but it sure sounds worth checking out to see if it would work.

The Department of Transportations seems to agree. They’ve given Solar Roadways a $100,000 dollars to try it out.

We don’t seem to be able to resist the urge to simply remove mountaintops in our search for coal, but in North Carolina they’ve identified, and are making moves to prohibit, an even greater danger to the scenic beauty of mountain peaks, namely, wind turbines.

A furious battle over the aesthetics of wind energy has erupted in North Carolina, where lawmakers are weighing a bill that would bar giant turbines from the state’s scenic western ridgelines.

The big machines would “destroy our crown jewel,” said Martin Nesbitt, a state senator who supports the ban, according to a report in The Winston-Salem Journal.

As it currently stands, the bill would ban turbines more than 100 feet tall from the mountaintops. Residential-scale turbines (typically 50 to 120 feet high) could still go up, but the industrial-scale turbines that can produce 500 times as much power or more would be effectively ruled out. The legislation appeared likely to pass the state Senate last week, but got sent back to committee.

Now, if you’re going after wind power, the top of a mountain is a pretty obvious place to put your turbine. A debate over the aesthetics of such a plan is understandable, though. While i personally think wind turbines are kind of cool looking, not everyone agrees.

But it’s hard to see how anyone who objects to the look of a wind turbine would be happy with the way a mountaintop looks after being flattened in pursuit of coal. If we’re really going to consider aesthetics when planning energy policy, it would be nice to see a state legislature take up the question of which is worse, removing the mountaintop, or building on it?

Under the Bush Administration, an all-out effort was made to open up public lands for oil and gas leasing. The Obama Administration, including Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar it seems, is looking at alternatives.

Mr. Salazar, appearing in Las Vegas with Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, said that 670,000 acres of lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (an agency within the Department of the Interior) would be studied to determine whether they could support large solar power arrays.

Twenty-four tracts of land in six states — Nevada, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah — are under review. Maps of the land will be published shortly in the Federal Register.

Given the current need to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, re-build our energy infrastructure, and Obama’s desire to create green jobs to stimulate the economy, it seems pretty inevitable that some public lands will continue to be opened up to energy production. And if the choice is between ripping up the landscape in an increasingly desperate quest for more oil and covering a few thousand acres with solar panels, bring on the solar panels.

Wind, Baby, Wind.

Proposed wind farms off the coast of New Jersey and Delaware took a major step forward yesterday when U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar gave four companies the right to build research towers offshore - the first such leases the agency has issued for the nation’s outer continental shelf.

The leases will allow the companies to gather crucial data on wind speeds and other meteorological information.

Until now, the companies and New Jersey, which has agreed to invest $12 million in three projects, have relied on public data and wind resource experts.

To be economically feasible, the farms need an annual average wind speed of 18 miles per hour.

So, they need 18 mile an hour winds to make it work. Here’s an idea. Let’s get all the blowhards who were yelling “Drill, baby, drill” at the 2008 Republican convention, line them up along the East Coast shoreline and let them chant for oil to their heart’s content. That ought to provide plenty of hot air to get those wind turbines moving

On the campaign trail, President Obama pledged an energy policy that would produce twenty-five percent of the U.S.’s electricity from renewable sources by 2025. That pledge was the stating point for negotiations on the energy bill working its way through Congress, and if the early indications are correct, barely a third of that goal is going to remain intact.

There’s also the possibility that the bills will encourage the construction of so-called “clean” coal plants and even new nuclear power plants. That’s not quite what the backers of clean, renewable energy have in mind, and, unfortunately, also a long way from Obama’s campaign pledge. The battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and lower our reliance on fossil fuels, isn’t going to be won in one session of Congress.

One of the problems with building a 21st century, greener, cleaner energy structure is that most of the current infrastructure is geared to support the use of energy that’s a main cause of our current crisis, and that infrastructure is crumbling away, to boot.

Take power transmission, for instance. At a time of cell phones and satellites, power is still mostly transmitted through metal wires strung from poles. it’s a method that worked for a centralized energy system based on fossil fuels, but doesn’t really fit a more decentralized system with lots of smaller, scattered producers. Plus all that copper is getting to be way to valuable to be left hanging over the countryside.

Power transmission isn’t the only one, but it’s a good example of an area where the goals of reducing pollution and slowing climate change simply require a better technology than what we’re using now. The better news is there’s an old possibility being resurrected that might fit the bill.

Remember the Woodstock of Physics? Probably not. Back in the spring of 1987, though, headlines were trumpeting it as the most exciting scientific meeting in history. Three thousand physicists crammed into a ballroom at the New York Hilton to talk about superconductivity-the transmission of electricity with literally zero resistance. The technology was suddenly within reach of being economical. So it appeared, anyway, and that could mean anything from superfast computers to tiny, powerful electric motors to power lines that could carry current with no loss of energy.

“We basically found a way to bend the unbendable,” says Greg Yurek, who left the MIT faculty in the late 1980s to found American Superconductor in Massachusetts. Superconductors have found their way recently into ships, wind turbines and electric cars. But the big push now is for power transmission. A major element of the “smart grid” is a new set of long-distance power lines to carry electricity from renewables like wind and solar. Conventional power lines are expensive, unsightly and wasteful-they can lose 14 percent of their energy from the resistance of the copper cables.

Superconducting cables have no such problem. A set of cables carrying five gigawatts of power-the output, of, say, five big nuclear power plants-can fit into a pipe just three feet across, and you could even bury it underground.

Superconducting cables may or may not turn out to be a solution, but they do show the kind of technological upgrades we need to to find a way out of our current reliance on polluting technologies. We aren’t going to solve last century’s problems by relying solely on last century’s technology.

While the rest of us were sneaking off for an early start on the holiday weekend, Congress was actually getting some major business taken care of.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee has approved a clean energy bill that would cut America’s heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions compared to 2005 levels in stages, reaching an 83 percent reduction by 2050.

By a vote of 33 to 25, the committee Thursday passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, often called the Waxman-Markey bill after its two authors, Congressman Henry Waxman of California, who chairs the committee, and Congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts, who chairs the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment.

The bill target numbers reflect last week’s compromise, and while they aren’t as ambitious as some would like, there are some real teeth in this bill. One looming problem, no Republicans voted for it in committee, and while that shouldn’t be a problem in the House, it raises the possibility of a filibuster threat in the Senate.