Name | Description | Proximity | Viability Rating | commentary |
Nuclear Power | Near | High | Easily one of the best options for near term energy production. The technology is well understood, once set up, doesn’t require any chemical input except water for cooling, and the mass to lifetime energy production is very high. The reactor from a nuclear submarine (or that size) should be able to power a decent sized base or small colony for decades | |
Peroxide power | Producing electricity? | Near | Low | I don’t know what the chemistry is behind this idea. Whatever it was mixed with to release energy would have to be imported, or the reaction would have happened already. And the cost of importing would likely be more than the energy produced |
Geothermal power | Near | Low | Mars is a pretty dead planet, there is no longer any volcanic activity, so this would probably be a non-starter | |
Fuelled generators | Near | High | This presumably, is producing fuel, e.g. hydrogen and oxygen from water, to fuel transport like rovers and rockets. As far as that goes, it’s a viable option | |
Solar Power | Near | High | Along with nuclear, one of the best power options in the near term. Whilst there’s less sunlight per meter on Mars than Earth, there is abundant space to plant solar collectors. If they could be mass produced, silicon to build them is freely available. | |
Lunar Beam | Collecting power on the moon to beam to Mars | Medium | Low | Collect solar power in Mars orbit and beam it to the surface or collect it in Lunar orbit and beam it so Mars. The sunlight per meter is stronger in lunar orbit, but aiming it accurately enough to Mars would be a real technical challenge. One slip, and… |
Fusion Power | Medium | High | Efforts have been ongoing for decades to crack Fusion Power, and they are yet to succeed. If they did, it could mean huge amounts of cheap, clean energy available. | |
Power grid | Needed to spread power and resilience | Medium | High | Used for transporting power from reactors and solar farms to homesteads and industrial sectors. Makes sense |
Mohole area | Deep tunnels releasing heat and gases | Medium | Low | There’s no known thermal activity near the surface of Mars, so you’d have to dig deep. There’d be insufficient gases to help terraforming noticeably, and solar power would provide more energy |
Solar Wind Power | Far | Low | The force exerted by solar wind, the rush f charged particles expelled at high speed from the sun, is minute. It would likely be useful for propelling cargo at low speed to Mars, but as a source of energy it would be useless | |
Beam from a thorium asteroid | Energy beaming from an asteroid rich with radioactive elements | Far | Low | Thorium could power the next generation of nuclear fission reactors, but this idea has two major problems. Firstly, beaming energy from an asteroid or another planet would be a significant engineering challenge, both to keep the beam tight enough, and to aim it well enough. But more importantly, it is very unlikely that an asteroid would have a decent supply of fissile material. |
Windmills | Far | Low | There is wind on Mars, but because of the negligible atmosphere it has next to no force. Even when the atmospheric density reached 20% Earths, there would be more efficient means of energy production | |
Great dam | Far | Medium | This presupposes 1. Sufficient surface water, 2. a rain cycle to move the water around and cause rivers to flow. That’s a long-term prospect | |
Wave Power | Far | None | This is a non-starter. Even if there was sufficient surface water, Mars doesn’t have a big enough moon to cause tides. No tides, no waves, no power | |
Tectonic stress power | But there’s no tectonic process on Mars | Far | None | There is no tectonic process on Mars |
Lightening harvest | Floating superconductors connecting clouds with a superconducting wire. the triggered and collected discharges are beamed down to a receptor | Far | Low | This sounds whacky, requires technologies we don’t have for power we can get elsewhere |
Deep well heating | Getting heat from the core | Far | Medium | This may be technically possible at some point, but solar power satellites would be easier |
Artificial photosynthesis | A more advanced of solar panel, presumably | |||
Heat Trappers | Utilising heat gradients for energy production | Low | Mars is a pretty dead planet, there is no longer any volcanic activity, so this would probably be a non-starter |
Transorbital 