Essay by Eric Worrall
“… we think we can build and commission a 2GW power station every year. …”
Space-based solar power: How it works, and why it’s being considered now
ABC Science / By technology reporter James Purtill
It’s an idea that sprang from mid-century science fiction and was being seriously considered in the 1970s, in the golden years of space flight.
Key points:
- Space-based solar power involves beaming clean energy to Earth from orbital solar farms
- If it works, it could supply non-intermittent renewable electricity
- But the technology is unproven and may end up costing more than projected
Space-based solar power (SBSP) was eventually dismissed as too expensive, and consigned to the attic of Space Age fantasies, along with lunar bases and ray guns.
Now, it’s back. Space agencies are returning to the idea of constructing enormous orbital arrays of solar panels, then beaming the power to Earth via microwaves.
Putting solar panels in space may seem unnecessary (when there’s still room on our roofs), but this vision of the future has powerful backers.
Millions of dollars are being ploughed into the concept of vast photovoltaic “islands in the sky”.
…
Martin Soltau is an analyst at Frazer-Nash Consultancy and co-chair of the UK’s Space Energy Initiative, which is a consortium of companies, universities and government helping to develop SBSP.
A solar power station at the “gigawatt scale” is achievable within 12 years, he says.
“After that … we think we can build and commission a 2GW power station every year.“
…
A cost-benefit analysis commissioned by the ESA calculated the average cost of electricity generation by SPSP over the lifetime of a generator unit, including construction, maintenance and decommissioning.
It arrived at a figure of 0.038-0.106 euros per kilowatt-hour by 2045 ($0.059-$0.16 per kWh).
By comparison, Dr White says, ground-based solar has a cost of around 0.03 euros per kWh — and falling.
The figure doesn’t take into account the need for storage, but “the cost of storage is also coming down rapidly.”
…
Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-12-20/space-based-solar-power-europe-funding-research/101733558
Dr. White’s squirming over the cost of terrestrial solar + energy storage is amusing.
The fact space based solar is apparently being seriously considered, and the emphasis on the fact space based solar is not weather dependent, in my opinion is a rare glimpse of the dire state of the terrestrial green energy push.
Even some of our more numerically challenged green politicians are starting to realise that renewables are more hype than potential, that the intermittency and unreliability of terrestrial renewable energy is a showstopper.
Of course, space based solar is not without its problems. Space experiences its own “weather”, in the form of solar storms, blasts of radiation which can damage fragile electronics.
Low Earth orbit is suffused with corrosive monatomic oxygen blasted off the top of the Earth’s atmosphere by solar radiation. Chemical erosion may be less of an issue if lots of money is spent to boost the solar power satellites into geostationary orbits, but the radiation can be worse in higher orbits. Geostationary orbit (22,236 miles) is inside the Van Allen radiation belt (400-36,040 miles), a region of space where the Earth’s magnetic field traps energetic, electrically charged radiation which can wreak havoc on sensitive electronics.
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But less destructive to the environment.
Just two little physics problems beyond impossible cost.
It is not possible to build a needed transmission line to space. So, the 2 GW PV energy must be beamed down by lasers.
Which raises two other little physics problems. Nobody knows how to build a laser of the needed beam power operating continuously. Fancy NIF isn’t even in the same ballpark—and they have been working on that for 20 years. And, if they did figure that out, the collimated beam would spread out in the turbulent atmosphere full of clouds and water vapor and proceed to cook a rather large area around the target receptor apparatus. Reverse problem of the adaptive laser optics now used to cancel atmospheric ‘blurriness’ with large ground based telescopes.
With ridiculous stuff like this reappearing, you know they still got nothing workable in renewables. They deal in the recently discovered periodic table heavy trans elements impossibilium, unobtainium, and hopium. All three are an improvement on the several existing unstable trans elements that only exist for a fraction of a microsecond before decaying. These three are apparently stable, detectable now over climate alarm decades even tho they do not exist in reality at all.
You are too pessimistic. Mr. Goldfinger had that laser in a James Bond movie,
Better build the receptor and coat the surrounding area with administratium.
Administratium is much too dense due to the numerous subatomic morons. A thin layer of ice-nine would be a better protective coating; it’s less expensive and lasts an eternity!
Rud,
Are ALL the climate alarmist modelers smoking hopium now!?
I wonder if large insolated pits of porous rock material from mining slag/waste (There’s clearly lots of mining that has to be done) could be heated from space during optimal conditions. Perhaps some type of molten salt collector could heat steam that could be pumped through these pits to create reservoirs of dispatchable artificial geothermal electricity.
Can’t we all just relax and be friends …the dilithium core is coming soon. 🤣
Technically it’s the matter/anti-matter reaction that produces the energy. Dilithium crystal is what regulates the reaction so it doesn’t blow up the starship. It’s also only used for the warp drive and other energy-intensive systems. Regular old deuterium fusion provides a crew’s day-to-day power needs.
This has been your Star Trek Nerd Out of the Day. 🙂
It occurs to me that we should submit a multimillion dollar research proposal to the government to find naturally occurring antimatter bodies in space. A matter/antimatter reaction power plant would solve all of our energy problems. Once the grant is secured we could meet in the Maldives (paid for by the grant) to determine just how in the hell we do that. It may require many, many meetings.
A point that Martin Soltau (“Sol Tout” really?) and Dr. White may neglect is that beamed transmission of large amounts of energy via microwave will cause significant, but very local, “climate” warming.
I’ve been playing on the fringes of the Space Solar Power (SSP) community for years and know many of the folks involved. The fundamentals of the idea are sound and remove many of the drawbacks of terrestrial solar.
First, receiving the solar energy in space eliminates the intermittency problem (except for very short eclipses of the sun by the Earth). Second, the sunlight is not attenuated by clouds or the atmosphere making the full 1360W/m2 available. Third, the volume of space is vast so you’re not consuming otherwise valuable land, mitigating the energy density problem.
Most SSP concepts place the satellites in GEO. The satellite collects solar energy, concentrates it onto PV, converts the electricity to microwaves and beams it to a rectenna on Earth. The microwaves are attenuated very little by clouds or the atmosphere. The waves are diffuse making it safe for humans, wildlife and plants. (No death rays.)
The rectenna is a kilometer scale grid of wires tuned to the wavelength of the microwaves. Grid size will be on the order of a meter or so. The rectenna is connected to the terrestrial power grid like any other power station. The rectenna could be located off-shore or mounted to poles above a corn field.
The beam can be steered to different rectennas at different times providing flexibility in grid management. Because of the lack of intermittency, SSP is perfectly viable for base load power generation.
The obstacles are many. SSP satellites for GW scale production are enormous, many times bigger that the largest human made object in space, the ISS. Again, think kilometer scale and 1,000’s of tons in mass. The design can be massively modular reducing manufacturing and assembly cost, but the real problem is launch cost. At today’s launch prices the economics are untenable. If you believe Elon Musk’s starship reduce these prices by an order of magnitude, it’s starts to make more sense. It really starts to look attractive in a future where the materials come from the Moon or asteroids and the manufacturing takes place in space.
The UK government did a recent assessment:
Space based solar power: de-risking the pathway to net zero – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
The top expert in the US is probably John Mankins, former NASA Chief Technologist, who wrote a whole book on SSP. A more recent paper on his concept is here:
NSS-JOURNAL-New-Developments-in-Space-Solar-Power.pdf
I/m afraid it is more of Captain Picard of USS Enterprise than Jules Verne.
Think of all the Energy you need to launch these Solar Panels, it might even end up being more than the panels ever create and send back. I think somebody just wants to try this as a project, and happy to burn through some investors money.
Maybe someone could answer a question I’ve had about solar panels.
Clearly there is some relationship between the amount of light per unit area and the amount of electricity generated per unit area by solar panels.
Are they tuned to the sunlight level on Earth? Would they generate (say) twice as much electricity per unit area if they were orbiting Venus where the solar illumination is twice as bright? Could the chemical composition be altered to make that so?
Reflectors are much cheaper than solar panels, especially when launching them into Earth orbit.
The Chicoms are on the way to building their own Solar Power Satellite
https://spacenews.com/china-aims-for-space-based-solar-power-test-in-leo-in-2028-geo-in-2030/
“HELSINKI — China is planning solar power generation and transmission tests at different orbital altitudes over the next decade as part of a phased development of a space-based solar power station.
The China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), the country’s main, state-owned spacecraft maker, plans to conduct a “Space high voltage transfer and wireless power transmission experiment” in low Earth orbit in 2028.
The satellite will be capable of generating 10 kilowatts and carry a solar cell array, microwave transmitting antenna, a low power laser transmission payload, a transmitting array and test power transmission across distances of 400 kilometers from orbit.”
end excerpt
So how do you get the energy from space to earth? An energy beam – microwave, laser pointed at a receiving station. So when the beam steering computer breaks (things do break) and the giga watt beam starts wandering across the landscape, what then?
I’d much rather have a phaser. I’d probably get it sooner, it would be more useful, and it would be a lot cheaper. (The original Star Trek version, of course.)
This all fell out of the O’Neill space colonies work of the 1970s – 1990s. Bill Brown was the microwave transmission expert at the time. Rectennas were kilometers across. Inbound flux was on the order of natural sunlight. They proposed grazing cattle underneath the raised array. Fun part was the microwave flux, which would heat up the body in a controllable manner. Someone (maybe Brown himself, I forget) proposed using the microwave flux for internal heating, raising internal temps 10 -15 F or so. Made a lot of us very uncomfortable.
Most of the early proposals can be found in the proceedings of the Princeton Conferences on Space Manufacturing.
Last I heard, SSP was most economical today in space to space transmission, where it could be focused. Cheers –
Yes, Space Studies Institute did a lot of studies on space-based solar power.
The design I liked most was an inflatable balloon one mile in diameter which was covered on the outside with thin-film solar cells. The balloon was launched deflated and was inflated in orbit using about 40 pounds of helium.
There will be a big market for solar power in orbit once humans reach a certain stage of development in orbit, which shouldn’t be long. The next ten years will be interesting.
Before we invest a ton of money, how about a small scale demonstration. Beam the power about 7 miles and lets see what type of loss you have. A distance of 7 miles should make it simple because the earth curves about 16 feet so you can turn the demonstration on its side and 7 miles will be a good approximation of the atmosphere the power will have to pass through. Personally I am betting in the inverse square law to win. The last time somebody tried this was near 100 years ago and it was a guy named Tesla. He put a lot of money into it and soon ended the project. Maybe somebody knows something about power transmission that I don’t. If so, I will freely admit that they know more than I do after the demonstration.
They already tried that, lost about 40% of the power over 1km. But they still seem to believe losses over 10s of thousands of miles are manageable.
https://newatlas.com/energy/us-navy-beams-1-6-kw-power-kilometer-microwaves/
Frankly the beam loss isn’t the biggest issue IMO, the biggest issue is the cost of putting all this infrastructure in orbit. I’m a fan of space technology, but putting satellites into space to increase people’s energy bills seems a complete perversion of the original promise of making people’s lives better.
I think the idea is manufacturing on the moon or in orbit possibly using astroids for material. There might even be cheaper ways to get material out of the gravity well. However the question with the link is was the loss because of the atmosphere absorbing the power in which case the loss will be greater with the 7 mile test or did the signal miss the receiver in which case a larger antenna might reduce loss.
Sounds like nobody really wants to know the answer to that one.
I vote we send all the “climate crisis” true believers to LV-426 to mine the necessary materials.
And since there MIGHT be a threatening alien life form present, I also vote we nuke the site from orbit.
It’s the only way to be sure.
MarkW is cookin’today!
Bro’ do we not worry about being radiated because of that perfectly tight beam that remains perfectly focused and perfectly aimed forever, or do we not worry because the beam is so wide, the power per square is harmless?
You cannot have both. Even if Soros pays you to say so!
Then there is the issue of every researcher NOT paid by the monopolists find serious harm from RF, while EVERY paper paid for by BigTelco assures us “it is not ionising”. They won’t put their hand in a microwave oven to demonstrate the safety of non-ionising radiation, so I don’t know…
In the end, free speech stops where you threaten harm and violence. Are these fools now trying to shut us us by pi551ng us off enough to tell them what their miserable lives are really worth? Do they want a friggin’ slap in da hed? Do they so desperately need to shut me up, they foment violence against themselves?
But I can imagine this working on Mars, early days, before the rich people go there, with only working class expendables running around cleaning up, preparing for the masters’ arrival.
There is a very simple, costless, solution to our climate crisis:
RECOGNIZE IT ALL AS AL GORE”S CLIMATE SCAM based on lies from its inception.
Let me know when they can build the equipment they need in orbit to do this plus the rocket to lift the payload into orbit, all from component materials sourced WITHOUT ANY fossil fuel inputs.
Oh, and when they have a solar powered or wind powered rocket capable of lifting it all, of course.
Until then, just wasting fossil fuels to produce electricity less efficiently than can be done with a coal, oil, or gas power plant.
Placed into Earth orbit…
What they’re really saying is that they’re going to spend absurd amounts of money for solar arrays that shade the Earth.
For energy that they have no feasible method to reliably transmit to Earth’s surface.
Beam microwaves through the Earth’s atmosphere.
Lots of dust and clouds and other things floating around up there that microwaves on that scale could heat up.
Will the meme switch from “Climate Change” back to “Global Warming”?
PS What do microwaves do to ozone? (I don’t know.) Will we making more “ozone holes”?
What about oxygen? (I don’t know.) Will we be making more ground-level ozone?
Remember when “Popular Science” had an article about space based solar power production? Remember how they claimed that the power collected would be converted to a microwave for transfer to Earthbound collectors? Remember thing, now that would make a hell-of-a weapon?
… converted to a microwave beam …
Remember thINKing …
And they would burn up in re-entry unless it’s an old Amana.
More SI/FI, 10 million square feet of solar panels orbit the earth on dead Satellites. Wagon train them and beam the power down to Berlin, Scotty! We’ll bill them later. LOL
If it is that easy to beam electricity why do we have a metal wire based grid? It’s 10% more efficient than aluminum transmission at grid scale. Seems like infrastructure cost saving would be a no brainer. SC cable isn’t ready for a massive grid scale and may not be anytime soon. I am asking the question because I know nothing.
My guess the reason is similar to the gasoline vs CNG conundrum.
In the mid 1970s, my thermodynamics professor spent the previous summer as part of a NASA team investigating methods for sending down power from space, just as being discussed here.
As I recall the problem was this: you either sent the power down widely dispersed, which required a huge array on the surface, or highly concentrated, which would require a sterile safety zone on the surface and in the air, and any “misdirection” of the beam could have terrible consequences. Both could suffer high losses during inclement weather, say a snowstorm or thunderstorm.