Japan building 1GW, $21bn solar power station in space
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It is extremely ambitious, the article puts a possible date of operation around 2030, which is about 5-7 years after ITER should come on line.
If you can make a 1GW (1000 MW) energy plant for about 1.5 billion terristrially then to pay a 14 fold premium to put the same thing in space (but renewable) as well as a whole bunch of very serious problems to overcome (microwave radiation can be 'tight' beamed but that 'tight' is not as sharply delineated as you'd want to for an application like this, there are serious technical issues there) is a pretty brave thing to do.
I hope they will succeed with this, and that if they do not that we will gain lots of useful knowledge.
If Richard Branson (to pick a random spacefaring billionaire) was fronting a few billion dollars of his own money, that might be brave. Spending other people's money on boondoggles that are wildly unlikely to produce a positive return is not brave.
Plenty of infrastructure projects have started either as military or pure research projects. Eventually we all benefit, even the countries where the spending did not take place.
This is my favorite example of this type of argument, because the moon visits should not have happened when they did. A handful of government employees spent a few days on the moon (at an enormous cost to other Americans) at least 40 years before there was any useful reason to get there. The evidence of this is that we haven't gone back.
As for your other examples, your claim is as absurd as saying that if it weren't for Edison we wouldn't have interior lighting or if it weren't for Bell we wouldn't have telephones.
If in 1978, we had diverted 5% of GDP for 10 years to building something like Google, we probably could have done it. But in 1988, it wouldn't have been terribly useful, and by waiting 10 years we got Google anyway at a much lower cost (and without coercively spending other people's money).
Only when those conditions arose was a google possible, and in many ways inevitable.
To compare the invention of electric light and the telephone with the moonshot is to compare apples with oranges about as bad as I've ever seen it.
Compared to the amount of money wasted on various nonsense projects in their time, SDI comes to mind but there are plenty of other examples the moon saga was one of the high points in the history of humankind.
Sure the telephone and the electric light are great inventions, not a day goes by without use of them for a large portion of the people on the planet.
But they did not inspire a generation of kids to follow the path of science the way the moon episode did. We would most definitely be in a completely different world technology wise had that not happened, it probably was one of the best returns on investment in the history of man.
$125B+ (inflation adjusted) was worthwhile for inspiring people about what was possible.
Listen, I don't disagree that there were some benefits of the space program. But $125B+ is a lot of money for Velcro and inspiration. Let's keep a sense of scale here: if you assume YC invests $25k per company, $125B is 5 million startups (and 15 million or so founders). [1]
Just remember that the resources have to come from somewhere, and that if you're going to do it through government, you're spending other people's money to get things that you want. Someone else may not care about technology or the moon, and may prefer to spend that money on social programs or farm subsidies. Once you open the door that government takes the money and spends it, how can you possibly determine whose value system is better?
Also, to tie this back around to where we started, whether you support the idea of spending other people's money on projects that you like or not, my initial point was simply that risking money that isn't yours is not brave, whatever else you want to call it, because the politicians are not personally at risk of any loss. Worthless boondoggles don't even seem to negatively affect their reputation, and may even get them called bold.
[1] Note that I'm not proposing that the government should have invested in 5 million companies, but that an equivalent amount of resources was removed from the economy -- resources that could have built other things that people want.
have a look here for some more perspective on this:
Hyperbole is the pepper of interesting conversation, and I think the randomness of mentioning Velcro made that intention pretty clear.
For what it's worth, I'm a proponent of space as well. I just think the Burt Rutan / Richard Branson route is more likely to get people like you and I into space in our lifetimes than a government program, which by its nature sucks resources out of the economy that could be used by people like Rutan who have an actual incentive to make it affordable. NASA has had over 50 years and they've done little to nothing to bring the cost of space access down. The Scaled Composites folks, as I understand it, were able to use very very little of anything that came out of NASA (except Velcro [1]), as it was all geared towards multi-billion dollar budgets.
Like you mentioned about Google being more or less inevitable, I believe Burt Rutan and people like him are inevitable (in a free market) when the time is right and the technical and capital foundation is in place.
(And I'll again point out that we're still missing the only point I really wanted to make here, which is that risking other people's money, particularly when they haven't freely given it to you, shouldn't be called brave even if you personally believe it's somehow worthwhile.)
[1] Velcro is actually a bad example anyway; it was invented long before the space program.
And I agree with you on the bravery when just looking at th e money side of it.
I wasn't really thinking as much about the money alone though your cut & paste made it look like that as on the combination of expense and technical obstacles to overcome.
Especially the latter will have lots of challenges, a project like this will require a fairly advanced degree of space assembly and/or manufacture.
To justify the capital cost, it isn't enough to show that you'll make something cheaper than it is now. The capital investment needs to produce technology that is so much cheaper that it can outcompete other options and still provide a return on the capital that exceeds the opportunity cost of tying up the resources. If you can't expect this, then the endeavor is a net misuse of resources.
Japan has roughly 40M barrels of proven oil reserved. They consume 5M barrels of oil a DAY. Without imports, assuming they could even get at all of their oil, they would run out in 8 days. They are the world's 3rd largest consumer of oil, and the world's second largest importer.
Half of their energy consumption is oil, another 15% natural gas (which comes from extracting oil). Coal and Nuclear make up the majority of the rest. Japan's mining is well beyond peak-coal. The vast majority of their oil comes from the middle east. Japan is an island, they are entirely dependent on energy imports. This means that if their trade routes were cut off they'd be hosed. Since the US dominates the world's oceans, that means that Japan has to keep the US happy. Sucks strategically and politically.
Space based power is useful strategically. You can beam it to an island. It is very difficult to cut off, regardless of the size of your foes' navy. You can beam it directly to a fleet in the middle of the pacific. You could use it as a weapon.
It just means Japan can't get saber-rattly in the US's direction. There isn't a huge impetus for them to do so, so...
That said, I totally support this way of bringing science fiction a little closer!
> It is very difficult to cut off, regardless of the size of your foes' navy
Would it be that to hit it with a rocket? (Or a stone thrown really hard?) I assume it's quite vulnerable.
Outside transportation, Oil is also used for heating homes.
Nuclear is definitely an option for Japan. They also have to import the uranium, having virtually none on the island, but that is still much easier to import and stock up than other resources. That said, it's probably easier to shoot your proverbial rocket or stone at their nuclear plants than it is to shoot it into space.
This is proposing a $21/W solution-- not a good idea. By the time it's built, terrestrial solar will likely be 5-10 times cheaper, i.e. around $2-4/W.
However, it is an oversimplification. As stated, it doesn't account for externalized costs, that is, costs of the product that are not borne by the seller.
For example, the energy industry has historically benefited because part of the cost of their product -- that is, the damage done by pollution -- is not paid for in the sale of the energy, but is borne by the public at large. Thus, the cost of pollution has gone into the coffers of the energy suppliers (and their stockholders). This is the inequity that legislation such as cap-and-trade try to alleviate (not that I'm a fan of this legislation by any means, the gov't is just as bad).
But from history of man kind seems that investing in new things and even exotic research is in the long run extraordinarily beneficial.
Gains from gathering resources and building ITER (or GPS, or orbital power plant) earlier not later can give humanity much greater benefit than it would gain from instantiating 5 mln startups with 1/5mlnth of the used resources.
I'd even say that no value can be created by human activity (by means other than resource exploitation) if it does not involve inventing or applying new technology.
If it's government funded/subsidized it's more likely to divert capital from more productive R&D and uses in the economy.
The benefit from additional discoveries is already factored into the cost of conventional solar. The companies building it have business plans that recognize the development work they're doing, and charge prices accordingly. And that's part of why it's cheap (relative to this proposal) and getting cheaper.
Indeed, but the type of jobs generated by these types of projects are hardly pointless ditch digging.
The benefit from additional discoveries is already factored into the cost of conventional solar.
But only if the companies are Japanese. Otherwise Japan is not only helping grow another countries GDP they're also helping them gain a further technology lead. Doing everything 'in house' is probably more inefficient in the short term, but might offer more long term benefits.
In this case, certainly the whole world would benefit even if a better solar energy technology (conventional or outer space) were invented. The polio vaccine helped the whole world; the reason that most of the revenue from it came to the USA is that the rest of the world thought that having those shots was more important than giving up their money.
And in economic terms, if tilting the economies of scale makes Japan a better manufacturer of solar power tech, then the law of comparative advantage allows other countries to benefit from supplying the goods that Japan will shift away from as it moves resources to the solar tech.
Then I think that Japan, currently the world's #2 solar market (Germany is #1), should be investing in thin film solar R&D for the reasons you listed.
In thin film, Japan (in the form of Sharp's second generation amorphous silicon panels) is getting its ass kicked by First Solar's CdTe panels. I think that investing in, for example, CIGS or CdTe technology would be a better investment.
Their population is very dense, especially in urban areas.
How did you get this number?
I'm thinking $21 billion / (30 years * 1GW) is a little less than $80/MWh [1], which between two and three times the market price [2].
The way to look at this is that the electricity produced is expected to refund one third to half of the investment. I'd imagine the IP created will be worth a lot more.
1. http://www06.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2421+billion+%2F+%28...
2. http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/commodities/energyprices.ht...
21 * 10^9 dollars / 1 * 10^9 W = 21 $/W
Those are just watts at peak power, which are probably roughly 10x average power produced by panels, at least on the earth.
But perhaps I was too hasty in that the major hit against solar panel production is the earth obscuring the sun at night. On the other hand, I would expect cells in space to heat up substantially, given that they have no air to conduct away the heat.
If I could, I'd edit my comment to clarify that my comparison was not fair-- I was comparing two systems with different capacity factors as if they were the same.
Silicon Valley: The high-tech society of the 2010 Silicon valley is hit hard when its futuristic power source goes awry - microwave beams transferring solar energy from an orbital satellite miss their intended receiver and instead incinerate many businesses and people in the area.
For Japan, I think $21 billion investment in windmills in the ocean would lead to more energy than creating a solar power station in space that sends back electricity in the form of microwaves.
It's an ideal country sized energy suicide weapon though.
Sort of a satellite born seppuku.
Also, think anti-ballistic missile defences -- no need for adaptive optics and all that jazz when you can swat the missiles with lasers from their most vulnerable position, right at the top of their trajectory.
Also, in all of the following keep in mind that we're talking about a re-entry vehicle here which has extensive heat shielding anyway just to survive its inevitable contact with the atmosphere.
It is more about energy density if this could be used as a weapon against an ICBM or not, the receiver of the energy would presumably be a fairly large patch of ground with a 'safe zone' around it in case of minor misalignment.
If you'd want your gigawatt to be concentrated in an area of 100x100 m under 'normal 'conditions you will not be able to quickly reconfigure to something on the order of a hotspot as produced by a battle laser (this is not a laser!).
In normal operating conditions and assuming they can beam as tight as 1,000,000,000 Watts per 100x100m patch (which remains to be seen) you'd have about 100KW / square meter, or about 10 W / square centimeter assuming absolutely perfect (so lossless) transmission and 0 reflection.
Microwave absorption of the ICBM would then be the deciding factor if anything happened to it or not, 10W / square centimeter seems a lot but it really isn't, the question is how long the beam could be focused on the incoming ICBM and how steady it could be held.
With lasers this appears to be possible, see this http://boeing.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=817 but it was an aircraft at subsonic speeds vs a stationary ground target.
Shooting stuff down that moves very fast is not that easy, especially not if your normal mode of operation is for energy transmission instead of destruction.
Unfortunately the people that launch these things are well aware of that, which is why if they are launched they are not launched 'one-by-one' to allow you to recharge your lasers between shots.
Another slight problem with the strategy is that any attacker capable of launching an ICBM at a country would probably also have the capability to hit that platform, and wich a 1GW radiated output it provides you with a really nice fat target.
All that would happen is you would make a hole in it, but since it's on a ballistic it would keep on going. (Ballistic means gravity is controlling it, it's not powered.)
Even if you blew it up, at best you would spread nuclear material all over the target area.
You need to hit these things during the boost phase, where a: you can stop it from going ballistic and make it fall back into the launching country, and b: you have something volatile to blow up (the fuel).
Also, it's easier. When it's at the apex it's moving horizontally very quickly, and it's at it's closest to you. Which is the most difficulty when it comes to aiming (since the angle of the shot is moving the fastest at that point).
When it's moving vertically toward you is much easier to aim, since you barely have to move the laser.
A high-powered laser won't just heat stuff up. If you can pump enough energy to small enough surface area in small enough time, the outer layer of the object being hit will be ionized. The laser will pump even more energy to this cloud of electrons and ions. For all intents and purposes, this cloud can be called an explosion.
Yes, I'm saying that when you hit a piece of garden-variety steel with a strong-enough laser, it will blow up and disintegrate into small pieces.
And even if the missile is moving very fast horizontally at the apex the movement is entirely predictable, even minutes into the future. All you need is two rangings, then you can just point the laser at where the missile is going to pass trough.
And anyway, you can predict the motion as soon as the motor is finished, you don't have to wait for the apex.
It's very difficult to aim the laser that well - even if you know exactly where it's going to be. Even if you were perfect in location and control, random atmospheric effects would mess it up.
The only practical way is via feedback loop, and when the angle is changing so fast it's very very hard to do.
You want a place where the angle doesn't change much, and all you need to do is adjust it based on feedback.
As far as destroying the missile - you need to pump enough energy into it to vaporise the entire thing. Normally an explosion will fracture the object near it. That cloud won't. You are moving very fast in air (even at the apex), and any ions will be blown away, plus they are only moving away from the missile, and not toward it, so they will not damage it. (They are moving away because they came from it, when they vaporized they bounced off the surface and away from the missile.)
You have to vaporise the entire thing layer by layer. And the energy in the cloud will not help you - since it's moving away from the missile it won't heat it, in fact it will insulate it (until it's blown away by the air) because all the energy of the laser will heat the cloud, and do nothing to the missile.
It's too easy to defend against a laser anyway. A small amount of water in the nose, released when it detects a laser will produce a cloud of water that will absorb all the laser's energy.
Not in a space based laser aiming at an ICBM at it's apex, it would be about 500 to 700 km depending on the trajectory, and doing about 14,000 km / h.
You couldn't do anything to a country. You could damage a small area if you concentrated it.
If the capture area is 4km, then anything on the ground larger than 2km x 2km would not even notice you doing anything (since it gets basically that much sun anyway). And with the losses (I estimate only 25% of energy is captured). You can radiate an area 1km x 1km without anyone noticing (which is about a city block).
To do damage you'd have to a go a lot smaller. It would take a very long time to do anything to something even city sized.
A space-based solution has a far higher cost to threaten; you basically need to have ASAT weaponry and that's (at least for now) somewhat out of the reach of non-state actors. Not to mention a space-solar satellite would have enough onboard power for some fairly aggressive countermeasures.
Edit: grammar
In both of these respects, it is exactly identical to NASA.
And yes, in Japan that is considered a practical spinoff.
PS: AIG has already payed back 9 billion of it's 80 billion loan, and expects to make another 25 billion payment fairly soon. Granted it's selling off assets to do this, but it's profit of $1.8 billion in the second quarter gives you some idea how many assets the company has. http://money.cnn.com/2009/08/20/news/companies/aig/index.htm...
The "cost" was the risk assumed by the taxpayers.
PS: The actual cost estimate of the bailut was probably upto 10% of the amount of money loaned. It's quite possible we will make money from this at which point talking about the cost based on the total loan amount would be silly.
The opportunity cost was enormous. The bailouts were a disaster for American capitalism. We now have a huge tattoo that reads "WARNING: Crony Capitalist Country. Proceed with caution".
Don't ignore the very difficult to quantify effects of the bailouts on the credit markets. The whole lesson will surely make the US a less credit worthy market and raise more questions about the dollar.
Me: Hmm, I wonder if I should spend $1,200 on a cheapish Dell or $3,000 on a Mac.
NASA: You should spend $300,000 on a NASA laptop.
Me: What kind of laptop costs $300,000?!
NASA: The kind built with space-age technology by defense contractors in redundant factories conveniently placed in every congressional district in America.
Me: But... $300,000!?
NASA: Its cheap for the price. You get a revolutionary new cooling system, suitable for working outside the atmosphere.
Me: But... I don't need to use it outside the atmosphere.
NASA: No, it has to be used in space.
Me: But all I need is a laptop.
NASA: No, a laptop -- to be used in space. Besides, once we're done with it, you can keep the cooling system.
Me: But if I needed the cooling system, I would have paid you to do R&D on a cooling system. I don't need R&D on a cooling system. If I did, I could get it a lot cheaper. What I need is a laptop.
NASA: A laptop... which can be used in space.
Me: Space is not a requirement! Space is something you add to the project because you wouldn't exist without space! Space doesn't add value! Space merely costs! Costs lots of money!
NASA: That's hurtful. Besides, the NASA laptop is cheaper than Social Security.
Me: I don't care what it is cheaper than! The frame of reference is not "other wasteful government programs"! It is "a laptop"!
NASA: A laptop, in space.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/TORU_dock...
I don't know the timing of space-based solar power, but if it matches demand, that's a big deal, especially if it isn't as weather sensitive as ground-based solar. (I don't know if clouds and the like are more transparent to sunlight or microwaves.)
Tidal power ends up attracting a lot of conspiracy theories. Why are we bombarded with news and policies about wind and solar when on paper huge tidal generation capacity is probably viable right now? There could be something there, I don't know.
It's like the first step. Right?
What happens when a plane flies underneath the beam?
A 100 meter diameter beam would take 0.4 seconds to cross, the energy density would be 12.75 W / square centimeter.
The kind of effect would also be quite dependant on the wavelength used, longer wavelengths would be harder to 'tight beam' than shorter ones.
A typical microwave oven 'beams' 1KW or so across an area about 15 cm radius, that's roughly 1.3 W / square centimeter.
How tight the beam is really is the crucial question to answer here, 35000 km up the beam will be very tight right under the point of emission, near the surface of the planet (an airliner flying 10 Km up) it would be much more dispersed.
for example planes flying at 35k feet don't cast visible shadows.
Which means the time of 'transit' would be the time the image of the sun takes to move a single solar diameter across the sky, and only for those people who are in the line-of-sight, so it would be a different group of people almost every time this happens, at most twice every year.
No such 'guy' would exist.
What could possibly go wrong?