Guest essay by Eric Worrall
China has announced an energy roadmap which includes plans to build a megawatt solar power satellite by 2030, and a gigawatt scale space based solar power satellite by 2050. If this roadmap proceeds, China could become the undisputed master of global orbital engineering projects.
Space solar power station: can science fiction become a reality?
Looking forward to the future, the long-awaited Bishan Space Solar Power Station Experimental Base (hereinafter referred to as the Bishan Base) has finally started construction. Zhong Yuanchang, a key expert on the team and a professor at the School of Microelectronics and Communication Engineering of Chongqing University, told the China Science Daily that the base is expected to be completed by the end of the year and related tests will officially begin next year. In the early stage, they have carried out energy transmission experiments at an altitude of 300 meters.
According to reports, only a few countries such as China, the United States, and Japan have actually carried out ground verification of space solar power plants. In my country, in addition to Yang Shizhong’s team, the team of Duan Baoyan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a professor at Xidian University, is also intensively carrying out relevant experiments.
Building a solar power station in space sounds very sci-fi, but the reality is also not easy.
At the Xiangshan Science Conference, academician Wang Xiji of the Chinese Academy of Sciences summed up the key technologies required by the space solar power station system as “gathering, transmitting and building”. However, it is extremely difficult to overcome each key technology, so that experts and scholars have called out that the construction of a space solar power station is just a concept.
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According to the roadmap, my country will build megawatt-scale small space solar test power stations from 2030, and have the capacity to build gigawatt-level commercial space solar power stations by 2050. The first stage is divided into three specific steps. First, the ground and aerostat test verification of key technologies are carried out, followed by the verification of high-altitude ultra-high voltage power generation and transmission, and finally the space wireless energy transmission test.
The current work of the Yang Shizhong and Duan Baoyan teams is in the first step of the first phase.
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Read more: http://news.sciencenet.cn/htmlnews/2021/8/463245.shtm
Anyone who thinks China cannot mount such an extravagant project has not been paying attention. Over the last few decades, while the neglect of successive US administrations allowed America’s industrial heartland to wither, China has pushed full steam ahead with uninhibited economic expansion plans, and now controls 1.5x the manufacturing capacity of the United States.
The USA still has the edge in terms of space technology. But how long until China catches up? How many talented US scientists and engineers are fed up with creating designs for space mega-projects which simply end up gathering dust on some NASA bureaucrat’s shelf?
If China takes a sustained lead with providing consistent funding for major space projects, many scientists and engineers might find the opportunity to work on a well funded visionary space programme irresistible, even if it means they have to work for the Chinese Communists.
Working for the communists? Like von Braun for the you-known-whos? Not if you are really clever.
Ideal way of zapping comms and spy satellites in low earth orbit!
Or a way to jam Starlink-style services over China.
Pie in the sky stuff – literally.
give them a few yrs and it will be another mil setup and weapons base FFS!
How much power can solar power satellites deliver?
The power range of the concepts for SPS is from a few tens of MW to several hundred of GW. Just for comparison purposes, a modern standard nuclear power plant delivers about 1 GW and the energy need for Europe in 2020 is estimated to be about 500 GW. If we can come close to the theoretical transmission efficiencies via electromagnetic waves (50-60%) then we could produce around 400W electricity per square meter on Earth receivers, which is about two to three times the amount we could receive from the same area of terrestrial PV panel. Furthermore, this would be produced continuously, day and night.
Put simple mirrors in space and PV panels on the Earth.
Finally, someone with some objective information about this concept, which was outlined in 2002 in a review of ways forward for the future. No one ever looks at the history of these approaches, what has made inroads since, and how large the actual amount of energy generation in comparison to the piddling magnitude generated today by solar and wind, always discussed in terms of its % rate of growth, a number that is impressive, but still yields small numbers in comparison to carbon-based generation projections for 2050. No, this satellite concept is not driven by supplying large amounts of energy to the earth but the concept is a “natural ” for acquiring sufficient power fluxes from local capacitance storage onboard satellite systems for laser and microwave weaponry to interdict continental missile systems. No microwave transmission of large gigawatt levels is likely.
see: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/298/5595
The US exported its industrial power to China for cheap labor. Everything China has is either given to them or stolen. That was not neglect but purposeful.
The US gave China the rocket propulsion and guidance systems and who knows what they got from Russia that put them into space. Pardon the sarcasm but China’s advances have been on a silver platter and back alley deals.
Or they may be building a space based weapon. One could do a super melt on ants from space with that thing.
Power station in space?
That’s gonna take a LONG transmission cable…
🙂
It’s time for a reality check on the proposed Chinese powersats . . . nothing new here, all these issues were surfaced previously when the US seriously examined the engineering issues related to this concept . . . oh, several decades ago. Not much has changed since then, excluding increases is solar cell conversion efficiencies.
Here are the major problems with powersats today:
— Large solar collector area required: assuming one wants to use solar cells for the simplicity and reliability of converting solar energy directly to DC electricity which is then converted to microwave energy that is beamed to a receiving antenna on Earth’s surface, and optimistically assuming a solar cell deliverable conversion efficiency of 30% (yes, I am aware the some laboratory investigations of multi-junction concentrator solar cells have achieved efficiencies up to 47%), to achieve 1 MWe continuous output would require a solar array area equivalent to a circle 56 m (183 ft) in diameter that is always maintained normal to (i.e., facing) the sun. The capability to deploy such a large solar array, or multiple arrays, from a single satellite does exist . . . with a satellite the size of ISS in LEO!
Also, note that today the best flexible solar arrays have solar-to-electrical conversion efficiencies of only about 24%.
Now, imagine how much worse the problems will be with a collector sized for a 1 GWe powersat.
— Rapid degradation of flexible solar arrays in LEO space environment: the flexible solar arrays on ISS have be found to degrade in terms of power output efficiency at a rate of about 2.7% per year due to the space radiation environment (exposure to EM spectrum and to high energy particulate radiation). The same, likely worse, would be expected for MEO and GEO satellites. However, the non-flexible, thick glass-cover type of solar cells (much heavier in comparison) have been found to degrade at a slower rate, something around 1% per year, in the space radiation environment at GEO altitude.
— Orbital mechanics inherently leads to inefficient system design: if the powersat is not placed in a geostationary orbit, it will be faced with the problem of having to continuously and very precisely steer it’s microwave antenna to one or more receiving antennas on the surface of Earth, or alternatively it will suffer periods of power transmission blackout even if placed into a north-south polar orbit. On the other hand, LEO and MEO satellite altitudes enable much smaller microwave radiation beam sizes at Earth’s surface compared to that required for transmissions from geostationary altitude distances.
If the powersat is placed into a geostationary orbit (a hugely expensive proposition compared to LEO or MEO placement), it can use a simple fixed antenna (relative to satellite attitude) to beam down microwave energy, but due to the inherent antenna beam radiation distribution pattern and inherent beam divergence with distance, the increased range from earth’s surface means the energy will be spread over much larger area at Earth’s surface. Therefore a huge, necessarily expensive, receiving antenna array is required. This increased “beam size” also means that more microwave energy will be absorbed during transmission through Earth’s atmosphere, leading to a decrease in overall power transmission efficiency.
— Additional inefficiencies: I haven’t even touched on additional power conversion inefficiencies associated with (a) satellite conversion of DC power to microwave transmitted power, (b) ground receiving antenna absorption of transmitted power adjusted for finite antenna size and beam distribution pattern {ref: reciprocity theorem}, (c) ground conversion of received microwave power to AC power suitable for output to “the grid”.
I would not be surprised if these inefficiencies amounted to a net loss of 30% of electric power that was obtained at the satellite level.
Additional issues for solar powersats are summarized at http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph240/long2/ .
The powersats are like making L-5 colony from Earth.
They might work if powersats made electrical power for space use- as making it
possible to have all sever farms in Earth orbit.
Maybe that’s China doing- it allows complete control over the internet.
“Maybe that’s China doing”
What? The L5 colony?
Server farms, though better word is Data centers:
“Data centers can be thought of as the “brains” of the internet. Their role is to process, store, and communicate the data behind the myriad information services we rely upon every day, whether it be streaming video, email, social media, online collaboration, or scientific computing.”
Or it seems to me at some point data centers will be in orbit, but probably not anytime soon. But anyhow, they do need a lot of electrical power.
And a problem on Earth is cooling them and space they would have that similar issue- or space is not cold as some imagine it is.
But if electrical power in space is cheap, then one probably resolve the cooling issue.
“Building a solar power station in space sounds very sci-fi, but the reality is also not easy.”
Worse than that, what can they possibly do with it? The most strenuous energy demands are those involved with launch and reaching orbit. You can garner all the energy you can imagine once in orbit, but that doesn’t help you get up there.
China says its just a power generation platform. Yeah, sure it is.
What it really is is a huge directed energy weapon platform. A gigawatt microwave laser would be pretty serious.
If they can beam power to an antenna they can beam power anywhere, i. e. A weapon. We could never build such a thing , imagine the environmental impact statement and the safety analysis reports.
This is the result of regulation, taxation, environmentalism and anti-nationalism…which political party is that?