From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Me GrimNasty
I don’t know whether Grant Shapps ever took out a subscription to Look and Learn when he was young, but circumstantial evidence would suggest that he might well have done. It was in the long-defunct children’s magazine, I have a vague recollection, that I first read about the idea of beaming solar-generated power down from space. Shapps is now so taken with the idea that he has just approved a £4.3 million grant to UK universities to help develop it. A quarter of Britain’s energy, he claims, could one day be obtained in this way.
I don’t begrudge the technologists their public money. It is a perfectly proper role of government to fund the development of science and promising technologies which might otherwise struggle to obtain private funding in their early years. And who knows, maybe it will one day turn out to be a practical means of generating energy. Up in space, of course, it is always sunny – and the sunlight is much stronger, having not had to travel through the Earth’s atmosphere.
But a quarter of the UK’s energy, and in time to help Britain reach its 2050 net zero target? Dream on. There is a reason that the exploitation of solar energy from space has remained a pipe dream for the past 50 years. It is fantastically difficult. First, you have to design solar panels which are light enough to launch into space and will continue to generate massive amounts of power without maintenance for many years – not just generating enough electricity to power a few instruments for a few months, as a solar panel on a space probe flung into outer space might do. But the far bigger issue is, how do you then transmit the power down to Earth so that it can be used? The Californian Institute of Technology says it has succeeded in beaming a small amount of energy wirelessly from a satellite to Earth. But there is a long, long way to go between that and commercial operation.
Shapps’ enthusiasm can be quite endearing. “People thought it was impossible to land a man on the Moon, or impossible to split the atom. You follow the science and the impossible becomes possible,” he said in backing the UK’s effort for harnessing solar energy from space. What he didn’t do, of course, was to list the many miracle technologies which have remained pies in the sky. Everyone remembers President Kennedy’s promise in 1961 to put a man on the Moon by the end of that decade.
Few recall Nasa’s promise to put a man on Mars by 1980. Nor have the promised tourist jaunts to the Moon yet materialised. What is possible and what makes commercial sense are two very different things. No-one yet knows what the price of solar power generated in space will be – if it ever comes to fruition. Nor, incidentally, do we yet have the nuclear fusion-generated power which the head of the US nuclear energy industry told us in 1954 would be ‘too cheap to meter’ by his grandchildren’s day. In fact, we still don’t have a single functioning nuclear fusion power station.
I’m no Luddite. Let’s have a go at all this stuff. Trouble is, though, that the government has committed Britain to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions in 27 years’ time on the presumption that multiple as-yet unproven technologies will miraculously arrive in time. There is a fine line between optimism and Panglossian foolishness, and Grant Shapps, I fear, is on the wrong side of it.
and here’s another, not so bright, idea but no great harm is done – tho it could have been. Methinks some engineers saved the day.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/06/15/pioneering-electric-plane-shelved-batteries/
Involving batteries again = a Chinese Ponzi Scheme……
Headline:China is Throwing Away Fields of Electric Cars
the toob
Now remind me how Renewable Energy, a really fantastic Bright Idea, was/is going to be made viable and cheap using battery storage….
So at last the cat is out of the bag. UN chief denounces carbon capture plans thus proving that the intention isn’t to decarbonise the worlds energy but to impoverish it’s population
UN chief says fossil fuels ‘incompatible with human survival’ | The Times of Israel
Anything the UN has its grubby hands on, should be taken with a pinch of WEF
The UN chief is an idiot just like most other UN delegates. The UN is a dumping ground for useless hasbeen leftist politicians. Defund the UN and make the world a better place.
Did they really manage to put a man on the moon travelling unprotected through the Van Allen belts and a few other questions?
I wonder!
I’ve got some green swamp land to sell them…..in space.
Does it have a bridge? Not interested if no bridge involved
It does not matter if it works, it just needs to be listed on the London exchange with politico backing.
ESG Larry will fund it
Shapps, armed with his HND in finance, is hardly competent to assess anything nut zero – he believes wind energy is our saviour, because some turbine salesmen told him so
From battery cars, to heat pumps, to smart meters, to renewables – all as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike from an Engineering perspective, but Grant thinks these are the new messiah, because he’s been told so by activists and other conmen
When the nut zero chaos really hits home, financially and socially and the civil unrest is unbearable, Grant will have retired in comfort, it’ll be someone else’s s**t to shovel
Well, the Chicoms plan on having a working solar power satellite in orbit by the year 2030.
And there is this:
https://www.space.com/space-solar-power-satellite-beams-energy-1st-time
I favor building a solar power satellite out of a balloon. Cover the outside with solar cells, pack it into your space launch vehicle, and when it gets to orbit, the balloon can be inflated.
One Gerard O’Neill plan was to launch a deflated balloon such as this, using a space shuttle launch, which would be one mile in diameter when inflated, and could be inflated using 40 pounds of helium gas. I forget what the power output was..I’ll have to look it up. Space Studies Institute and Gerard O’Neill did a lot of work on these things.
The balloon doesn’t have to be aimed at the sun, half of the solar panels will always be lit.
The main holdup back in the 1970’s when these were first discussed was the flexible solar cells that would be required to cover the outside. A lot of progress has been made in that area since that time.
There will be uses for solar power satellites in orbit to power habitats and orbital transfer vehicles and all sorts of good things.
Now, will the Chicoms beat us to building the first solar power satellite in space? If left up to our governments, the answer would be yes, but we have a few forward thinkers, not in government, who might make this happen for us.
Here’s Space Studies Institute:
https://ssi.org/
Wonderful, and if a stray satellite or other space debris happens to destroy this agglomeration of solar panels, we lose up to 25% of all our power generation in one fell swoop? Not to mention, given that it’s in space, it’ll probably cost more billions and take a decade to build another set and get it up there. Where’s the Picard facepalm gif when you need it…
27 years. About 9700 days. A lot to do in that time. 22million residential heat pumps plus 8 million commercial premises. 32 million electric cars to sell/buy plus 6 million commercial vehicles plus an appropriate number of chargers installed. You can all add things that need doing that are in your area of expertise. And only 9700 days, 233,000 hours but only 77000 working hours working 8 hour days 7 days a week and no holidays
.
Do your own maths as I have. Will somebody in power get real.
I haven’t even mentioned availability of materials.
Obviously poor Grant knows nothing about radio transmission or microwaves. Strangely there a rather large number, known as the free space path loss for radio signals. Light has the same but happens to travel at just the right range of frequencies for it to be small to space, hence we get sunlight. However at reasonable microwave frequencies the number is quite large, and the signals interact with various of the atmospheric constituants, particularly water and water vapour. This is the simple reason why radio transmitters have such high radiated power, nearly all of it is lost! This will also need to be a geostationary satellite too, so that it points to a fixed location on Earth to receive the power, and the beam will need to be of the order of tens of meters wide at 25,000 miles distance, so the sending antenna will need to be both extremely accurate and probably many miles across. Interesting satellite!
What fun. If the energy beam is narrow and drifts off the receiver, surrounding areas will be summarily fried.
If it is a broad beam, it will warm the country and specifically cause warming of the surface, which is likely what these retards do not want.
I see that the UK government is to ditch the proposed hydrogen levy. They have finally realised that hydrogen will never replace natural gas for home heating. This plan for satellites converting solar radiation into electric power, though theoretically possible, is yet another far-fetched idea. Imagine the size of such a satellite & its solar array for a multi gigawatt station. Our politicians are no engineers.
An interesting idea but at the scale needed, horrifically expensive, potentially dangerous and an ideal military target.
We have the technology already.
Old style magnetrons each feeding slotted waveguides would work out of the box but you would need millions of them!
You could go ultra modern and have planar arrays using semiconductor modules, many millions of them.
Then what do we do when the signal arrives on earth? Millions of slotted antennas, each with a microwave detector diode.
Yep, all of the technology is available and it could work but it would be astronomically expensive.
My thermodynamics prof in the mid 1970s had spent the summer working on a NASA project to investigate space-based grid power. When it came to transmitting the power to earth you had two primary options:
Disburse the power “beam” so widely that it was harmless to the folks on the surface. But the ground-based receivers would be so large you might just as well have terrestrial solar arraysConcentrate the beam which would necessitate dangerous “no go” zones in the sky and on land and a potential “death ray” weapon if the beam became misdirected.Both schemes were subject to significant weather-based attenuation.