Space-based solar power is getting serious
science.org
science.org
It's just far more efficient to build solar PV arrays on the ground, and to keep power on 24/7, build enough to store the energy for later use at night and in the winter. Throwing all that mass into orbit, even if in low-Earth orbit where decay and burnup in the atmosphere is guaranteed over time for the debris issue, is just a massive waste of resources, plus the energy loss over 100 km or so would undoubtedly very high.
Here's a list of more realistic applications (with a rather military-industrial flavor, although space exploration applications also exist):
> "At the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, we have spent the better part of the past 15 years looking into different options for power beaming and investigating potential applications. These include extending the flight times and payload capacities of drones, powering satellites in orbit when they are in darkness, powering rovers operating in permanently shadowed regions of the moon, sending energy to Earth’s surface from space, and distributing energy to troops on the battlefield."
#1 Military forward operating base #2 Anything that has to be in the middle of nowhere, think mining and agriculture, maybe even oil rigs #3 Shipping, it could make electric container ships viable. #4 Anyone who wants to rent their power, rather than build their own panels. You're shifting CapEx to OpEx. This is why cloud computing took off. You can have any amount of power you need at the flip of a switch. People will pay a massive premium for that.
In particular, transmission losses and low efficiency seem to be the fundamental problem. See previous discussion:
How does one do this without power? And if possible, why isn't it done already?!
You synthesize the fuel when and where you have power.
> And if possible, why isn't it done already?!
Hasn't hit cost parity yet. Hydrogen is the cheapest and it's still about triple the price. More portable fuels are more expensive to synthesize and cheaper to mine. Add a carbon tax (bunker fuel is filthy) and watch it happen overnight, or wait until around 2030 when the prices will cross over (but there will be an equilibrium price while capacity is built).
So you really have to ask what kind of practical scenario affords you to use energy that is at least 60 times more expensive than what is available at ground level (but more realistically, at least 300-400x). Even if you include the capital cost of Li-ion batteries, their wear and tear and road transport for over 1000 miles, you can still get power much cheaper by just trucking batteries around. That, mind you, is before any transmission loses, investment in ground infrastructure etc., it makes no sense to put solar panels in space because the efficiency gains are simply too limited.
This leaves the military scenario indeed - which is basically sci-fi, but bras has been known to abandon common sense when planning technology, see the initial Space Shuttle concept, space laser weapons etc.
The book The Case for Space Solar Power has detailed cost estimates for NASA's SPS-ALPHA design. It was published about a decade ago so has old launch costs. I plugged in Starship costs and got a total cost of $0.04/kWh, which is pretty great for dispatchable power without needing storage.
The raw materials would still need to be shot up into space. And what makes manufacturing and assembly in zero-g cheaper than on the Earth's surface?
Except for the massive byproducts created on earth to get through the "more expensive" phase. It would be deeply deceptive and cynical to sell that as "green", surpassing even today's deceptive selling of carbon capture and storage technology on fossil fuel power plants.
Fuel is a pretty small cost for rockets anyway so using more-expensive clean fuel wouldn't be prohibitive.
Hate to be the one to mention it, but the military may well be paying most of the freight to set most of this up (covertly or not) since space based you-name-it including hypersonic projectiles are going to be more and more useful as the decades pass.
Because why should we build things on the ground and deliver the finished products in orbit, when we can push an entire industrial chain into orbit and furnish it with the vast quantities of required inputs, while taking advantage of the vast nothingness that exists there, and the 100000 times more expensive labor. It's like Elon Musk's Mars city, but in vacuum, with zero in situ resource utilization.
In a large scale on orbit construction project, like a space based solar power station, we could manufacture complex interlocking units on the ground like space station modules on the ISS, and hope all the power routing, and docking, and everything else, will work together when launched… or we can build it the old fashioned way, but with robots or astronauts up in space… bolting, welding, wiring, cabling and routing everything up there from easily made standard parts that meet the requirements. Just like large photovoltaic solar farms are built on earth, with X units of photovoltaic panels, attached to structural support frames suitable for the location they are being installed at (wind loads, thermal range, etc) … and everything cabled together with hundreds of little plastic clips and miles of copper wire in weatherproof plastic conduit.
Now some things will obviously be different in space, like hundreds of plastic clips are obviously a space debris risk, so they probably won’t design cabling systems that need that sort of support. But they will need to manage lots of power and data cables which will need some level of protection from the slow but steady degradation by various forms of radiation and plasma from the Sun and deep space, and it turns out a few millimeters of plastic can get you years and years of protection from oxygen plasma which would could eat away at exposed wires and slowly increase the risk of short circuits. Yes it might need to be replaced regularly, but so will other things, and then you don’t need to use crazy specialised oxygen plasma resistant wire insulation…
Space is hard, but we build things for way more harsh environmental conditions on the ground all the time in industrial applications. What they don’t need that space currently does, is earth based industry doesn’t usually care about total weight. Starship will revolutionise space not by magic, but by slashing the cost per kilo and allowing us to use more normal engineering procedures and hardware where appropriate. Like panels and wiring and support structural girders. My point was that 3d printing lightweight plastic structural parts where they are needed, will be to space based solar power, what mixing concrete on a construction site is when compared to having everything transported to the site via cement mixers. Sometimes it makes sense for the project to mix on site, other times it won’t.
I’m not sure what there is to argue with about this thesis.
I argue that any kind of large scale structure fabrication is fundamentally different than the preparation of raw inputs, like your concrete example. A large orbital 3D printer is a complex industrial machinery that needs servicing, constant supervision and human involvement, it's more akin to the Hubble telescope than to an concrete mixer. The costs to operate it in space are orders of magnitude higher than on the ground even in the most optimistic orbit cost reduction scenario, short of space elevators and the like.
Until we have self replicating and selfrepairing orbital robots, any space project will need to contend with the fact that human labor in a spacesuit in orbit is inconceivably more expensive than a guy riding his bike to the factory in sweatpants, breathing the free air our planet seems to have aplenty and drinking the water that falls from the sky from time to time. And this is, I repeat, a fundamental stumbling block no matter how far launch vehicles advance, space will always be insanely hard compared to surface.
So you better have a damn good economic case for printing structures in orbit which are 1000x more expensive than the same structures built on earth. The savings from the support structure and the lack of foldable mechanisms necessary to deploy into orbit could be significant, but definitely less than a single order of magnitude.
3D printing aluminum isn't, you know, rocket science.
Other than naturally falling asteroids, to date we have managed to acquire about 400Kg of moon rock at a price point of roughly $200bln in today's money. That's about $500k per gram.
These speculative predictions about moon & asteroid mining imply technology advances that are so far into the future that they are basically mindless daydreaming. Things like self replicating robots, nuclear space-ships and other sci-fi staples.
We are decades or centuries away from that and the impact of such tech cannot be predicted - they will change society so much that we cannot even begin to imagine their impacts. Sort of like people in the 19th century imagined a future of personal balloons, not being able to imagine the impact of airplanes and the automobile.
You're right, according to me, about getting minerals from the asteroid belt, for earth use. That's not happening until the farther future: the delta is extreme, and down to earth itself not trivial. But extraction from the moon or mars moons (about the same delta to a lagrange point as the moon believe it or not) can be economical in bulk precisely because the cost to get to earth orbit can only go down so far (the cost of the fuel).
Fulton used to loiter around the fences around his steamship as it was being built; you should find and read all the scorn every single passerby had for the mad, doomed project that seems pretty ordinary now.
When I was young, maybe 1963, I had dreams in which people in the future were carrying around small devices with screens they kept looking at, about the size of my fathers pocket calender planner (3" by 6" maybe). Not a wholly original idea, Dick Tracy comics showed a TV watch back then.
My father, a very competent electronics engineer who was very well read, poured absolute scorn on the idea. He didn't just say that no known tech could do that, he said that the device was strictly impossible, and that no matter how long the world lasted, no such device would or could exist. His reason: you can't flatten a cathode ray tube that much. Time easily dispenses with our reasons why not.
Labor is extraordinary expensive, yes, at first. That is because our robotic technology isn't good enough and that people don't live and work in orbit yet. That will change with time as we begin space colonization.
That means you either need to sync the satellite with the Earth's rotation (Sun synchronous orbit), so you will deliver power at the exact time the corresponding Earth region has full sunlight (and thus, a surplus), or that you will have to go at insane altitudes. Or that you would need to launch some sort of orbital power ring that can transport the energy around the world.
Good-luck beaming power from SSO or across spans of thousands of miles. First let's see a phone that charges from across the room with no matter how bad efficiency, or an electric car charging wirelessly on the go.
This is the actual impetus behind the push. Much like nuclear, the militaries of the world want a new toy (focused beam weapon), but want to pass the buck to the civilian population and claim that it's abundant cheap power with no risks.
A second consideration is that these satellites can be factories in space. Raw materials are much easier to launch into space using rail guns as the materials can survive higher g forces then humans or pre-manufactured goods. Once in space, the raw materials can be made into higher quality goods due to the lack of atmosphere and gravity. Once they are in space they can be put to use making further satellites, orbital rings or habitats.
Move fast and break things as applied to air transport really makes for some exciting opportunities, doesn't it?
If you honestly thought "space based power beams" were a realistic solution, then why you would even propose a plane as opposed to a boat is entirely beyond me. This idea that we're just going to find some "plug in" solution to our current infrastructure that's suddenly net positive for the climate only invites these kinds of irresponsible flights of fancy.
If you want an honest solution, then you're going to have to reconsider the mechanisms that cause you to fly cargo across the globe on jets in the first place. These systems were built for profit, and they continue to operate with profit as their primary motivation. If you want to manage the climate "responsibly" then you need to put it first, and when you do so, you realize that our current means of distributing products around the world is patently insane.
Only by ignoring that problem or hoping that literal "power beams from outer space" will magically become available and prevent any restructuring of profit flows leads to this kind of nonsense thinking.
Is the concern here is a sudden loss of power or autonomous flight?
If a beam is lost, these electric cargo planes will have enough batteries for 20-30 minutes of flight until power is restored. In the worst case, they would have to make a safe emergency landing in the ocean without hitting ships.
If the concern is about autonomous flight, then it's not really different from many other autonomous systems: they absolutely work, but have to be implemented responsibly and pass regulatory audit.
Where does this number come from, exactly?
Also, why not circumvent these questions by using electrolysis to make zero-carbon fuel from sunlight, and just pump that the regular way?
Or ships, which can be wind powered most of the time and backed up by PV-H2 and/or beamed power in the doldrums?
We can probably also use lightweight PV coatings (or beamed power) on a blimp for air travel that won't crash when power fails. (But probably only for cargo; the Hindenburg meme will probably prevent passenger interest).
>Where does this number come from, exactly?
It's a ballpark. Electric planes are capable of having up to 1 hour ([1]), but I've taken a smaller number to allow for more cargo instead of batteries - there's not much difference between 20 minutes and an hour in terms of finding a safe landing.
> Also, why not circumvent these questions by using electrolysis to make zero-carbon fuel from sunlight, and just pump that the regular way?
We should try almost everything. A massively parallel approach to reducing CO2 emissions has a higher chance of success.
> Or ships, which can be wind powered most of the time and backed up by PV-H2 and/or beamed power in the doldrums?
Same - we should try all technically-sound options. Wind, green hydrogen, biofuel, ammonia, solar, nuclear, beamed power in the doldrums. Non-practical approaches will vanish, practical will find their niches.
> We can probably also use lightweight PV coatings (or beamed power) on a blimp for air travel that won't crash when power fails. (But probably only for cargo; the Hindenburg meme will probably prevent passenger interest).
Somebody should try that too.
This is all a thought experiment on achievable engineering. Have fun with it.
FTA: Most designs aim to produce a beam kilometers wide so that any spacecraft, plane, person, or bird that strays into it only receives a tiny—hopefully harmless—portion of the 2-gigawatt transmission
2 GW on a _single_ km² is 2kW per m², about twice what solar power provides. “Kilometers wide” could easily mean 10km², or 200W/m².
⇒ it will be difficult to get the power density to power an airplane, even if it’s only for flying at height.
Which kind of makes this whole thing a weird economic proposition. You’re beaming energy from space at a density that approximates solar insolation, and still have to build the collector and convert it back - wouldn’t it be easier to just collect the solar insolation?
That's not right. There's 2000 kW in a MW, not GW. 2GW is 2e9W, so over 1e6,^2 that's 2e3W/m^2 or 2kW/m^2.
Solar panels already have sufficient mass power density. There's a pretty big gap between the 10s of MW a jumbo needs and the 700m^2 of area it has. If you were willing to trade some flight speed you could increase wing area 5x or so, and maybe make it work in the 2-4kW/m^2 range if all of the photons were at your bandgap.
Getting funding out of the military budget could speed this up immensely. So you went into green-tec to improve the world? Sigh.
Multiple beams can only be guaranteed safe against malicious agents by making sure only one is in any given person's sky at any given moment, which either limits us to 6 worldwide or requires the satellites to be low enough that they're in earth's shadow.
(Last time I said this on HN, I got an angry response from someone who clearly didn't understand what I was saying; I don't know if that is because words are bad at painting pictures or not, but regardless I really ought to get around to blogging this with pictures to show what I mean).
Why can't it work? Critics of this idea often cite cost or unintended consequences, but not ineffectiveness at mitigating the temperature rise (ocean acidification etc. are a different issue).
That argument makes perfect economic sense ... now. The same way that burning fuel still makes economic sense in quite a few cases. But environment anxiety is not only about burning fossil fuels, it is about deforestation, farting cows, the use of land for human activities, and well, basically every industrial economic activity. There is environmental anxiety about solar and about wind energy production, and about nuclear power. And it is often an-out-of-the-blue spurt for something that happens in another continent[^1]. We are slowly but surely channeling that anxiety by taxing "Earth use".
Here is a thought experiment: try to imagine a world where human environmental footprint is bound in a way that satisfies even the most extreme environmentalists today, who--as anxiety raises--are going to be your average bread-and-butter (self-)conscious citizen of tomorrow. How does it look? How many of us?
I wish we come upon a time when we decide to have space-based solar power and space-based living. The alternative is disquieting.
But of course we can collect solar and wind power on crop- and pastureland while still using it for those things. I doubt we will be returning much of either to nature, even though about 1/3 of the US maize crop now goes into vehicle fuel, which demand ought to start to fall off eventually. In principle that land could be returned to nature, but I doubt it will be.
The most important part of this is that you can have things in LEO that are fixed to Earth points. Why does this matter? No longer do you have to speed up to Mach 30 to reach orbital speeds. You could technically run a cable from 150km up and carry people and goods from Earth into LEO and back. This could revolutionize long-distance travel on Earth too.
It's estimated that a space-based power collector could create about ~7 times the energy of an Earth based collector due to less power loss from the atmosphere and night (to be clear, a solar collector in orbit would still occasionally be occluded by the Earth but it won't be half the time).
You can get power down to Earth in two ways: you can transmit it. This is actually viable but is not ideal. Alternatively, if you have an orbital ring, you can attach it to that and just run cables down to Earth. We use longer power transmission lines than that on Earth already.
All of this requires no new physics, no magical materials (eg space elevators do) and are just (admittedly massive) engineering projects. If you can get solar panels into orbit for <$10/kg payload costs and run cables down to Earth, you'll solve the variance issue with solar and create cheap power on a massive scale.
And none of this requires commercially viable fusion (which I'm not yet convinced will ever happen) or even the serious externalities of nuclear fission power.
Carbon fiber is, or you could just have a tapered steel or aluminum cable.
The loop could be anything as it's under zero G. You'd need counterweights above it.
You only get access to the equator without some kind of bizarro maglev hula hoop contraption which would level a country if anything went wrong, and the equator doesn't really need help with solar or solar storage as PV+CSP works quite well there.
I strongly believe in the future of solar power in general because it's relatively low-tech and reliable. There are no moving parts (other than maybe turning an array to face the Sun while it moves across the sky but this isn't strictly required). So solar power can provide power in a lot of places where it's either impossible or infeasible to build infrastructure (eg remote places, war zones).
But once solar power source (or something else) is cheaper than burning oil, gas or coal you can use that power to make fossil fuelds by sequestering carbon from air. That's not that difficult but we don't generally do it because it makes little economic sense. But this method would make fossil fuelds essentially carbon neutral.
So there are vehicles that won't make sense to be replaced with EVs. Likewise, there are places where burning fuel may still make snese. Solar power may not make sense in jungles or hurricane zones so there may be continued use of generators. I can't speak to the specifics of Rarotongo. In general though, I think the technology and infrastructure will be truly transformative on a massive scale.
I was at a radio transmitter[1] on the West Coast of Australia the other day. It's the largest low frequency radio in the Southern Hemisphere, used by subs and military stuff.
The facility, which is 6 kilometres from a regular town, and has three diesel generators producing 18,000,000 watts of power, burns through 26,000 litres of diesel PER DAY. It's been doing that 24/7 since 1967. (There was a sign proudly stating as much)
We do a TON of stupid stuff, regularly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Communication_Station_Ha...
Now, how expensive - and how big - would an equivalent solar array be? Don't forget maintenance costs, including technicians.
Once all that is cheaper and just as reliable as their generators, only then will there be a discussion on replacement.
But in general, I agree that it should be done.
1. The inverter and other electrical systems do fail (surprisingly frequently).
2. Solar is very spread-out: maintaining a geographically large facility is not trivial (vegetation, water drainage, cables etc.)
3. Batteries also require maintenance, and are an inherent part of any independent PV installation (if the site relies on the grid, it is no longer independent).
For an easy point of comparison, there actually is an 18MW solar array under development in western Australia as part of phase 0 of the Yuri project [0] (the goal of that project is to produce hydrogen for ammonia production via electrolysis instead of steam methane reforming). This is apparently around 23 hectares (57 acres), at a cost of A$24-33m in capital expenditures, and A$0.5-1.5m in annual operating expenses [1].
For comparison, let's suppose diesel is A$2 / liter. 26,000 liters a day, for 365 days a year, is A$19 million, every year, just for fuel costs. Wait, you might argue, fuel prices are inflated this year. Okay, historically it might have been closer to A$1/L, for about A$10 million per year. Breakeven is therefore somewhere in the ballpark of 2-4 years, which is absurdly low for a project of this scale.
[0] https://gateway.icn.org.au/project/4938/yuri-phase-0
[1] Page 28-29 of https://arena.gov.au/assets/2020/11/engie-yara-renewable-hyd... -- capex estimate is A$70m. If you remove the capex of building the H2 plant, you're left with A$33 million. If you just consider the PV component (34% of the overall capex estimate), then you get A$24m.
Surely a 6km cable is the solution?
It's not like hospitals and data centres refuse grid connections and run entirely on the backups.
Dragging wire down from space to earth would require space-elevator level of tech.
And I'm pretty sure microwaving earth's industry's worth of electric power thru the atmosphere wouldn't be any easier. Might even cause atmosphere warming all on its own.
reminds me of the earth-moon fire pole
Active support towers going up, that may work (if we solve the engineering issues, AFAIK nobody has tech demoed it yet), as those don't need to be supported by the cable, meaning the cable can be much smaller.
The best engineering on earth is still under a km in compression. To hang a steel cable 150km all you have to do is make it skinnier towards the bottom.
The engineering issues of the bit at the top might be a bit eye-watering. A 100% reliable maglev sled supporting 100s of tonnes coasting on a catenary supported by centripetal force sounds like a recipe for the world's largest whip.
Launch loops start to sound less scifi as a space megaproject (although then we're back tosuper weapons)
Unfortunately, many of these frequencies are used by our tech. 2.45 GHz is one of the best frequencies to transmit at, however, this now used by wifi and bluetooth. According to this paper[0](see figure 55) it is reasonable to expect degradation of 2.45 GHz communication thousands of kilometers from the transmitter. This is due to the fact that microwaves spread out. [0] also points out that harmonics of the transmit frequency, which can't be ignored because SBSP transmits gigawatts of power, will interfere with licensed satellite transmission bands.
In short, frequency really needs to be allocated, otherwise SBSP may really be illegal. There are some good options, at least in the US, in the sub-10 GHz range used by few people.
> Phased array of transmitters focuses gigawatt-power beam anywhere on Earth in line of sight.
I wonder if it's possible to steer the power beam around clouds, so you transmit power to whatever ground-station has the best view. (Unclear if it makes economical sense to overbuild ground-stations just to be able to pick one with a clear view of the sky)
So what? Microwave frequencies aren't entirely line-of-sight, but they aren't going to diffuse very far off-target. Unless you have houses in between elements of the receiving antenna array, the disruption of comms in the immediate area isn't going to actually affect anybody. Perhaps there's some risk to jets that choose to fly through the energy beam.
And that's with a phased array transmitter that uses a reference signal from the ground. If it somehow repoints somewhere without the ground transmitter, the beam would spread out much more than that. (source: the book The Case for Space Solar Power)
As some anecdata, I remember a decades-ago report that said it would be safe to graze cattle under the receiving antennas, which suggests both that a) it wouldn't be safe for cattle above the receiving antennas, and b) it wouldn't be safe for humans even under the receiving antennas.
And you do have to care about malicious actors, not just accidents, on this scale.
You can only guarantee to avoid this if you put them in lower orbits so that no more than one is over anyone's horizon at any moment (bonus: saving on antenna mass), and with a phased array that's basically fine; but the lower they get, the more often they're in Earth's shadow.
(I really need to blog this with pictures, I don't want a repeat of last time this came up).
According to the book, the beam spreads out a lot if you don't have the ground signal, but it didn't quantify that. And there's always the possibility of some sort of covert action putting a transmitter in the target area.
If the malicious actor is hacking the satellites that power the victim's country, then the repoint gets a double whammy by cutting off power to the areas it was supposed to go.
I can't imagine an idea that's worse for space debris than SBSP. It necessarily requires huge masses, and huge surface areas. Total mass in an orbit is what determines if you're past Kessler's "tipping point." Total surface area is what determines how quickly the system erodes into tiny MMOD pieces (each MMOD impact releases 100x as much mass as the impactor itself).
The usual lazy rebuttal is that the preferred orbits are currently unpolluted. To that I say, with that attitude how long do you think it will stay that way?
The remaining "pristine" orbits are so high up that all the debris generated is effectively eternal.
There's a wave of projects of this sort like this here:
https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
Which sounds bonkers on the surface, but actually isn't using any new, groundbreaking technology(also implementations at half the length already exist), so it's projected to be more cost-efficient than e.g. Hinkley Point C - a nuclear plant that was supposed to produce roughly the same amount of power, but is yet to start after all the delays and cost overruns.
The idea isn't to improve safety; instead it would be to avoid cost overruns and delays by bypassing regulators.
I suspect it would accidentally improve safety as a side effect, but I am a cynic.
From what I've read the issues are usually connected with execution - critical components breaking during assembly and the like. Also regulations concern mostly safety, so it's not like they're there just to be an impediment.
But you generally don't have to go such lengths to bypass regulators - just make sure that your plant is hosted by a dictatorship.
The Astravyets plant was built on time(5 years!) and within budget($11bln). Allegedly there was an accident during construction - the concrete housing for the reactor cracked. There was also an incident last year which resulted in radiation reports from that area being shut down for several hours.
But hey, so far there hasn't been any major malfunction.
You forgot the bit where you sign up to be Rosatom's whipping boy for 30 years. But hey! It was on time and most of it passed safety inspections.
The article mentions current transmissions lose 50% of the energy... And that the receiving stations take up a lot of real estate. Why not use that real estate for solar panels on the ground..?
Even if you could utilize the sunlight 24 hours a day (which is not always possible according to the article), perhaps building more solar stations on the ground can be distributed so that that it's always sunny at all times?
Where on Earth do we beam power long distances in any other application? If it was a good idea we would be doing it instead of running power lines through complex terrain like over mountains.
The normal case of efficiency in power beaming is an efficiency of only around 40% (if that). At that point any gains you get from putting your solar panels in space are immediately lost in the transmission to the ground. At which point you've wasted a ton of money putting solar panels in space for no gain in energy as opposed to building them on the ground.
As far as I'm aware, any attempt at space-based power is some segment of scientists misleading politicians for funding grants. It doesn't make any technical sense.
This doesn't necessarily follow.
For example, imagine a 96% efficient magic pixie beam that costs exactly as much as 1000km of HVDC transmission line and travels in line of sight.
There's no line of sight where it outperforms HVDC, but if you could cross 4000km with two hops via space, suddenly it makes sense.
SBSP is still a terrible idea though, just not for that specific reason.
I haven't done the math, but it sounds wrong to me too. It would be nice if they provided actual wattage in the same units that are currently used for consumer devices, like cell phones.
You manage the beam intensity by having the collection area and the exclusion zone around the collection area be so large that the whole thing is entirely pointless and you could just use regular PV and concentrating solar.
One is laser powered aircraft. One could power jet engines directly with absorbed laser energy converted to heat, or use PV cells tuned to the laser wavelength to convert at higher efficiency than cells on sunlight (cooling these would be needed.) If this can be made to work the aircraft could have unlimited range.
Another possibility is direct exploitation of the beamed power in industrial settings without conversion back to electricity. For example, laser light might be used in a photochemical process. The Toray Process for making caprolactam might be suitable, but isn't that large a market; better would be some high mass flow scheme like photochemical processing of biomass-derived molecules to make fuels. Intense laser light might also be useful for heating high temperature furnaces, in place of arc heating. The beam could be focused by final reflective optics to high intensity.
What could possibly go wrong
The ground station is mostly antenna wire so it's still not a major cost.
Basically, with the distances we're talking about, only a super tiny fraction of the energy beamed from space would make it to an earth-based receiver. I can't reconcile this basic fundamental truth with the fact that these projects actually seem real. Can anyone provide insight here? Are these just fanciful proof-of-concepts that aren't intended for actual large-scale power generation?
https://www.quora.com/Does-the-inverse-square-law-apply-to-m...
> That is not the case with the telecom tower, or a flashlight, or a laser. In those cases, radiation is directed, not equal in every direction. The inverse square law still applies, but distance is calculated from an apparent source well behind the actual energy source.
See, the inverse-square law is about an emitted source diminishing because it broadcasts spherically - the surface area grows with r^2 because the surface is 2D.
A laser doesn't work that way, nearly. Sure it diminishes, but the spread is astronomically (!) small. So for a distance of say 24000 miles you can 'beat' the law to a great degree.
With masers, you aren't radiating out, you're pumping all the power in a straight line and you can capture approximately all of it by building a capture point as wide as the line.
(More technically, since of course you won't create perfectly parallel microwaves, there will eventually be dispersion, but it's not meaningful over the distances that you care about.)
E.g. for 3 GHz and a 500 m antenna, the far field starts at about 5,000 km
This means you can focus a great deal of sunshine onto less of expensive panel area, from much broader, cheaper, lighter thin-film mirrors. You would actually keep the panels edge-on to the sun to keep them cool, lit only by the mirrors.
I am betting that microwaves will not be the favored transmission medium. Lasers at optical wavelengths focus better. Maximum intensity could be limited to match natural insolation, for safety.
In principle, by using those monochromatic mirrors focused onto an array of laser cavities, you could generate the laser beams directly, without the round trip through PV panels. The laser wavelength would be chosen for maximum conversion efficiency at the ground array, where you ought to be able to get above 80% conversion.
If it's 20-50% more expensive than a ground based alternative Im pretty sure the military would happily cover the difference if it made for a good weapon.
If you put a giant laser fryer in orbit, you can expect China to be very unhappy. For example, they could see that any ship they plan to send to invade Taiwan could be fried.
Who cares what China thinks, you say? Well, they can put nuclear weapons in orbit, what are you going to do about that?
Superpowers don't like to gratuitously start the escalation game, if they can help it.
This is just another solar roadway. What a waste of time.
Sure we might be able to make the methane with sunlight, but having that ability removes the point of doing it in the first place.
Unless you're trying to build solar power north of the arctic circle I really don't see the need for such systems.
If it's using visual/infrared lasers, it absolutely can be blocked by clouds.
If it's using microwaves, it absolutely can still get weather fade during storms when it's trying to punch through a tremendous amount of water in the atmosphere.
And if it's out at lagrange halo orbits, it's not going to be doing any power beaming at all, as that's much too far to be useful unless we're planning on building dishes that are hundreds (maybe thousands) of meters in size on both the receive and send points.
Data centres could be one. Although metal processing, transport, and heating seem to be the largest energy consumers.
Of course making anti-matter, and using it as a store of energy is a possible option.
Actually antimatter could be trapped in the ionosphere.
What do the plans to make transmission cheap/efficient look like? Where would i read more detail?
Safe beams don’t have much more power than the sun so don’t seem too economical compared to normal solar panels. And most niche applications need greater power density to benefit
Basic idea is a phased array microwave trasmitter, a transmitter on the ground that sends a reference signal, and a receiving station that's basically several square miles of antenna wire, contributing 0.7 cents/kWh to the total cost.
Putting hardware in place that's expensive to get and even harder to service instead on some piece of land near equator and HVDCing it to places needing it seems not exactly cost efficient.
You'd be also burning most energy in transmission. Might make sense if it was say, above a mars base as it would probably be still cheaper than dealing with dust and you already shipped them to orbit so landing them on another planet is just extra effort
I didn't find a mention of seasons, winter, cold, heating. (I skimmed the beginning of the article.)
The biggest obstacle to solar is the seasons: We use the most energy in the winter (for heating,) but most of the sunlight comes during the summer. There are locations in the far north where there is simply no sunlight at all during the "day."
Seasons are definitely not "the biggest obstacle to solar". That would be the night and especially the weather.
The only advantage seems to be, in some imagined configurations, you might be able to keep the panel lit close to 24 hours a day.
The huge disadvantage that is never mentioned is heat disposal under those conditions. If you keep your panel illuminated constantly, then how, in a vacuum, are you going to send the heat overboard? This article doesn't even try to mention this fact.
Particularly when other infographic-heavy publications love to point out that with just a small solar farm in the African desert, we could power the entire planet. So.. if that's true, why are we even _pondering_ orbital power stations? Just to up the difficulty by a factor of 100x for gains that are almost impossible to achieve commercially?
I get that people are concerned about the climate and are willing to do a lot in service of it, but this entire idea is absurd.
The heat has to be radiated away, just as solar assemblies on current geosynchronous satellites radiate it away.
"The Solar Array Photovoltaic Assembly For The INSAT 4CR Spacecraft: Design, Development And In-Orbit Performance"
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sankaran-Muthusamy/publ...
Table 1 shows equilibrium solar cell operating temperatures in geosynchronous orbit. They're in the range of 49 to 54 degrees Celsius.
We should use that money to build more nuclear reactors and develop new designs. It’s a proven, reliable and inexhaustible source of energy.
Hell, if you used wind turbines to synthesize gas at ~50% efficiency and burn that to generate electricity at ~60% efficiency it would still be about 10-20% cheaper than nuclear power.
https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
Nuclear is expensive because of politics.
You're not making a great argument for your trustworthiness "not letting us poison the world and directly kill millions is unfair and political" is at least a rare piece of honesty, but hardly a compelling argument.
Fukushima cost ~$800 billion, so they are essentially subsidized by the general public to the tune of 99.97% of what is probably their "real" insurance costs.
So no, we are measurably on the hook for more negative externalities than we are for solar/wind.
Free insurance is a subsidy. Pretending that it isnt is dishonest.
Japan paid $0 in 2010 and by 2012 an $800 billion bill came due.
Recent nuclear legislation has focused on extending the legal life of aging plants. Nuclear power is getting more dangerous in America not safer.
It ought to be a moot point anyway given the extreme cost of nuclear power without the subsidy.
My guess is the next one will involve at least one set of forged documents about components and some manager pushing past a boundary to meet ever tightening cost targets.
That you think it would be possible to forge documents under managerial pressure shows that you Don know the first thing about nuclear power in the US.
Probably not a coincidence that it happened in the place with the lowest (unaudited) costs.
The US nuclear program is first class when it comes to accountability, reliability, and safety but this is also the reason that it costs upwards of $12/W excluding the publicly funded portions of the NRC's budget (which is one of the moredirect places the trillion dollar free insurance manifests) and various other subsidies. You either get the safety or you get rid of the red tape driving up costs.
And the thousands of people constantly shouting to get rid of all the red tape are why I think the next INES 7 incident will involve forgery.
I always thought waste disposal was not accounted for. Could you point me to any information indicating otherwise?
Usually localities fight for federal money, this is one case where that appears to not be the case.
That article is a great read in any case.
https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Awakening-History-Future-Nucle...
1: Commenters don’t compare like-for-like energy production, instead they often compare using the nameplate capacity e.g. compare construction cost of a 1GW nuclear plant with a 1GW solar plant. The right thing to compare is GWh produced. Capacity factor converts GW to GWh, and the capacity factor for nuclear is about 90% and for solar is about 15%[1]. Therefore the equivalent of a 1GW nuclear plant is 6GW of installed solar.
2: Commenters ignore the cost of systems needed to provide power in winter on windless dark nights. The real cost of wind/solar needs to include the necessary energy storage (batteries or pumped hydro or stored chemical energy or whatever). Some of that can be overcome by installing overcapacity (e.g. install 3x as much GW solar to cover aircon usage in early evening in Texas). Nuclear is very good at providing power at all times. Storage is very expensive - usually doubles or triples the cost of the wind/solar installation. The need for storage goes up as our dependency on wind/solar power increases.
By ignoring the above, solar/wind can look 5x to 10x cheaper than a fair comparison with nuclear. Many commenters are not interested in facts or numbers - they pick heavily biased numbers to make the argument they want to (usually that nuclear = bad).
A worked example of wind versus nuclear using chemical storage that shows 10% difference in cost: https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea... even with their obvious biases towards wind, and comparing against the crappy Hinkley-C, they are really struggling to show wind is cheaper.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/799330/global-solar-pv-i...
This is captured by net capacity and LCOE.
LCOE of new solar is rapidly approaching MCOE of existing nuclear.
> Commenters ignore the cost of systems needed to provide power in winter on windless dark nights. The real cost of wind/solar needs to include the necessary energy storage (batteries or pumped hydro or stored chemical energy or whatever). Some of that can be overcome by installing overcapacity (e.g. install 3x as much GW solar to cover aircon usage in early evening in Texas). Nuclear is very good at providing power at all times. Storage is very expensive - usually doubles or triples the cost of the wind/solar installation. The need for storage goes up as our dependency on wind/solar power increases.
This is captured by total system cost. While they're about on par (or favouring nuclear in europe) right now, today's optimistic renewable price is tomorrow's pessimistic.
Storage is about to do what PV did in the 2010s, and anyone being forced to pay for a half working AP-1000 or EPR in 2030 rather than 2x the net production in PV panels made of sand and a battery array made of rust all hooked together with aluminum for their utility money is rightfully going to be extremely angry.
No, because that usually completely ignores point 2. For example the commonly used Lazard data on LCOE ignores storage and has zero cost component to allow for time shifting over short or long periods. You need more than LCOE to make a fair comparison of costs of different energy sources.
Yes, there are solutions to correctly costing externalities, and delivering required power to load over time. My point is that too many commenters wilfully ignore the details, and they write specious cost comparisons.
I feel your comment is not helping because it contains half-truths. LCOE is useful, but not valid. Optimism is nice, but just another opinion.
For example, let’s look at https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... and compare the cost of solar they give, against a storage system that delivers the stored power over 10 hours of night (completely ignoring the bigger issues like seasonal requirements and peak power at noon). 1MWh of utility PV costs $28. Wholesale storage costs $131/MWh which is $1310 for 10 hours. The storage costs totally dominate the costs so tomorrow’s cost of wind or solar generation is completely irrelevant for a fair comparison. Currently, solar and wind can be cheap when comparing on LCOE MWh, because we have existing nuclear and gas plants providing power when they can’t. It is not intellectually honest to make dollar comparisons without trying to make the comparisons have some basis of equality. The cost of storage is dropping, but it has to drop a hell of a long way further over many years before it can compete with baseload generation.
I am not pro-nuclear. I am anti-misinformation.
Yes, you need to compare total system cost.
Which, as I said before you attempted to derail the point again, currently favours nuclear for a 30 year timescale -- but only barely.
You're also presently mixing up units of LCOS with units of capacity ($130 per MWh would be 0.05% of current costs).
> The storage costs totally dominate the costs so tomorrow’s cost of wind or solar generation is completely irrelevant for a fair comparison
Luckily I was comparing tomorrow'scost of storage. Storage is about to do what PV did in the 2010s. There are at least three separate battery technologies presently scaling production that need no scarce materials and have an extremely compelling case for a 5-fold reduction in price.
But even ignoring storage entirely, each dollar on renewables can remove more emissions than a dollar of nuclear. It's only when you have funded maximum penetration with ~4h storage that you should consider adding more.
Then there's the fuel issue. In all of the mines and all of the spent fuel and all of the enrichment tailings, there is not enough U235 and Pu for a single load of fuel to provide more than about 60% of primary energy. Adding more than ahout 200GW of nuclear is scifi.
The figure had a terrible smell when I was writing it, and is orders of magnitude out - that is an embarrassing mistake.
I am not denying that battery costs are falling drastically.
I am decrying that numbers are thrown around with no meaning, and then I go and do that. Fuck.
Thank you for your careful reply.
I guess it is probably just as frustrating seeing people claim a square mile of pv modules in a shipping container and nothing else is somehow a drop-in replacement for an AP-1000 for 1% of the price.
Cheers.
In general there's no point, it's just an illustrative example of the horrendous economics of nuclear power.
It might be a good idea to generate some gas if we one day have wind/solar producing >100% of consumption and all the batteries/pumped storage are fully charged. That'd be a nice problem to have, truth be told.
Currently, wind and solar rarely produce more than current demand, ever. Natural gas averages about 40% of our electricity supply and rarely if ever goes to zero even on the sunniest windiest days. Every MWh produced by wind or solar is just another MWh where we dont have to burn gas.
But right now, even though I learned about this over 22 years ago in my GCSEs, I think most people only even know about the Sabatier process because Musk wants to use it on Mars for ISRU.
> Unfortunately nuclear is regulated to death in the U.S. so it is extremeley expensive
These are the same fact. The second the regulators relax is the same second that corners get cut and limits get pushed because 'reactor designs are in essence "meltdown proof"'. That attitude is exactly how the five colossally stupid things that have to happen all at once to cause a meltdown start individually becoming regular occurrences -- after that it's just a matter of reactor hours before enough of them coincide with some other improbable event.
See the shutdown of Korea's fleet while forged documents were investigated for one of many examples. Or Fukushima.
I could see a microwave power satellite being deployed despite obvious cost inefficiencies, specifically because of the ability to zap things (defensive, hopefully ).
It could also be helpful anywhere needing mobile short term power, eg forward operation bases.
A single Dyson swarm would dominate almost anything shown in Star Trek, while being mundane compared to the Death Star (or derivatives) in Star Wars.
The replicators in Trek were shown to be capable of self-replication and ISRU in the season finale of DS9 season 5, and therefore ought to have been able to build a Dyson swarm around every Federation planet simultaneously over the course of season 6.
And don't get me started on the absurdity of Marvel putting Thor and Hawkeye in the same battle at any point. Even Norse Thor is absurd enough compared to a mortal human, Marvel Thor is much much worse.
dyson sphere still needs a lot of huge engineering upgrades at scale
in order to reach there humanity will have go to through series of such mega scale projects
- in Space micrometeorites and mere high energy received from the Sun deteriorate anything quickly OR it's not much a matter of launching something but keep it operational changing a piece at a time;
- it does not scale AT ALL because even at very low price of anything the cost is so extreme that we need something so cheap like "hey this WE instead of a trip nearby I go for an orbital trip, the price is roughly the same";
- microwaves transmission will probably be very harmful for human, nature in general and a big potential danger is a beam move/is traversed by accident.
The general real issue we have with renewables is:
- they are intermittent, our needs does not match, storage is needed to combine supply and demand but effective storage ON SCALE is missed and not foreseeable in a near future [1]
- anything must be designed to handle and profit of peak productions, the very opposite of ANYTHING we have built so far, from grids built at a certain size and interconnection to average the load as maximum to mere water heaters designed to run few minutes per hours instead of hyper-full-power for few hours per day
- we are still in a linear supply chain model, p.v. panels and lithium storage recycling is THEORETICALLY described but nothing exists on scale so far and probably will not appear in a short period of time
Just as an example my home-made p.v. plant cost around the price of mid-range "cheap" ICE car for around 10 years of expected life (sure modules last longer, but when lithium is depleted and inverters start to age there is no sense in keep old modules, the cheapest part, anymore), even with it I'm far from being autonomous, o sure, FORMALLY I can produce 120/130% of my overall consumption (except the new EV) BUT practically I can reach 50% self-consumption. And that's a new, well insulated home, with various stuff to maximize self-consumption since exactly NOTHING exists on sale with such target, even devices who claim to be designed for that. And the home is in the France south alps so in a very good location for p.v., many live far northern.
My conclusion so far is: it's ok-ish to push the accelerator on renewables to improve them since PUBLIC research in the modern financial-driven society lacks, but we are FAR, FAR, FAR behind what managers think we are or at least can be. To avoid hyper-big disasters we have just nuclear, fossil while we create new NPP, nation-wide plan to rebuild homes etc. Something THEORETICALLY doable in no less than half a century. In practice probably few centuries. I'm not joking. Those unconvinced: try yourself and see results. Mine say what I said above.
[1] effective means 6 month storage for a country of any size on it's own land, because yes energy is serious and we can't risk more than that at such a scale.