Shimizu Corporation, a Japanese architecture and engineering firm, has proposed to build a "Luna Ring", which consists of placing solar panels  6,800 miles long by 12 miles wide on the moon's surface.

The plan involves building robots to do all the heavy lifting.  Once the set up is complete, the energy collected will be sent to "receiving stations" around the globe by way of lasers and microwave transmission.

Shimizu believes this structure could continuously send 13,000 terawatts of power back to Earth. Those are some pretty big numbers. In comparison, the United States only managed to generate 4,100 terawatts of power in 2011.

[Inhabitat]