Solar Power From Outer Space Could Reduce Fossil Fuel Dependence
Rising fuel costs have spurred some pretty wacky ideas. One that maybe isn’t so crazy is harvesting solar power from space. While the idea isn’t new—NASA and The US Department of Energy studied it throughout the 1970s—the time has come when it might not be too expensive to start pursuing it.
Pravna Mehta, the director of India operations for Space Island Group, a company working to develop solar satellites, thinks space energy has excellent potential. According to his vision, satellites would electromagnetically beam solar energy to ground-based receivers, where the energy would be converted to electricity and transferred to power grids.
Since satellites in high Earth orbits are unaffected by earth’s shadows, the energy would be available every day without fail.
Unfortunately, it may be awhile before we see any concrete results from this idea.
While a 2007 Pentagon report encourages the development of space power, Charles Miller of the Space Frontier Association estimates that it will only be possible within the next ten years if we act now.
At the same time, getting into space isn’t cheap, the robotic technology to create solar satellites is not yet available, and someone has to take care of the billion dollar bill for the whole thing.
But with interest from Russia, China, the European Union, and India—and growing anxiety around the world about energy access— perhaps we might be using energy from outer space within our lifetimes.
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One year of the Iraq war could go a long way toward paying for getting such a system up and running.
Paraphrase:
Massive solar collecting satellites avoid negatives of ground based solar collectors and beam the massive amounts of energy to Earth. Costs a lot to do, saves a lot in the long term. Big countries are interested, no one wants to pay for it.
My opinion:
Also like the article says, this is not a new idea. And plenty of peons like myself have also been thinking about it for years. I just wish they’d create a small proof of concept to really encourage the money holders. Once the thing is in orbit it would require little to no maintenance. Free power? That you can charge for? The billionaires of the world will eat that shit up.
All we need now is a orbital elevator then we can build solar power generation system orbiting earth and watch as other nation destroy themselves for the little remaining energy source on earth.
Oh wait … it’s called Gundam the Anime series.
I call dibbs on Gundam Exia … that right Gundam.
http://www.gundamofficial.com/index2.html
Umm… while the idea is good, how long before it manifests itself as a dangerous problem?
Think, satellites beaming down raw energy… what if there’s a misalignment or some error.. and that height, few microdegrees off the target are enough to fry the unprepared area.
Done delibrately… controlling entity has power to fry the whole city in minutes without the apparent side effects of nuclear explosion. How long before this leads to some kind of dangerous arms race, much worse than cold war - it will be, because only fear with nukes is that the effect spreads beyond targetted area - and with big countries - they have still enough left to hit back and assured mutual destruction.
With this technology, if misused, that is gone - 2-3 satellites working together - outputting gigawatts of energy per square inch, can cover the entire US in matter of less than an hour.
Just my penny for the deliberate misuse.. I hope nasa has already thought about a part of atmosphere become superheated (as this energy screams down to receivers) and affect it will have on wind currents and thus global climate
This stupid idea just never goes away.
Fact 1: solar cells are MORE EFFICIENT on Earth than in space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell
Estimate 2: solar panel installs on Earth are around $9 per Watt installed. (personal experience)
Fact 3: solar panels are about 20 Watts per pound.
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=735164&id=3&qs=No%3D40%26Ne%3D35%26Ns%3DPublicationYear%257C0%26N%3D4294967096%2B4294966789
Fact 4: price-per-pound to GEO orbit is around $10,000 or more.
http://www.futron.com/pdf/resource_center/white_papers/FutronLaunchCostWP.pdf
Conclusion 1: excluding EVERYTHING else,looking at JUST the cost of transportation means, SPS’s will generate electricity at $500 per Watt (10000/20) absolute minimum.
Conclusion 2: in order to be competitive, SPSs will need to use transportation systems that are at least two orders of magnitude cheaper. In 50 years of space flight, prices continue to go UP, not down.
Conclusion 3: duh!
Maury
Are there any pros/cons to capturing sunlight from above the Earth’s atmosphere? Does the atmosphere change the light in a positive or negative way, to make it more or less powerful?
Also, a list of points was made by “still_required”. To your points about losing power in light transfer over such a great distance - we should keep in mind that we could create a light collection grid the size of Africa (or maybe Rhode Island) in space if we wanted to. No limit on real-estate to build on!
Space-Based Microwave Power is the way to go.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/16477
I have been up on power sats since 1975 when the just formed L5 Society presented the concept at the Limits to Growth Conference near Huston.
In those days we were expecting to get around the high cost of lifting power sat parts to orbit by using materials from the moon. Didn’t work out–partly because the price of oil went down for a few decades. Now that it is back up, people are starting to look again.
If you work through the numbers, you can make dollar a gallon liquid fuels with penny a kWh power. The cost of power is at least 5 times too high. Penny a kWh is physically possible if you can get the cost of lifting power sat parts into GEO down to $100 a kg.
Does such a low price violate physical laws? No. The cost in energy is only 15 kWh/kg, $1.50 for average consumer power in the US. If we had cable strong enough (and we might get it) a $100 billion moving cable space elevator written off over ten years would get the cost down to $10/kg.
The best price expected out of rockets is around $500/kg.
If you look at why, it’s largely the cost of aerospace hardware and the rocket equation which says you can only deliver one part in sixty of the take off mass into GEO with even the best chemical rockets
Ablative laser propulsion takes a lot of energy, but the performance in terms of propellant is excellent. Lasers don’t give a lot of thrust and launching from earth with a laser is not easy. But if you combine the high thrust of rockets and a really big laser it looks like sub $100/kg to GEO is within our grasp.
How it would work is a fully reusable 300 ton rocket (less than a Boeing 747) would take off every 15 minutes. It would accelerate straight up to about 2.1k/sec and release a 50 ton vehicle, one half payload and the other half propellant for the laser.
An 8 GW laser is enough to accelerate the combination to orbital velocity in the 15 minutes before it reenters the earth’s atmosphere. If the laser cost $10 a watt, then it would cost $80 billion. But spread over ten years and a 8/10th of a billion kg per year, the cost is only ten dollars/kg. The rocket stage can deliver this payload to sub orbital for well under $50/kg.
Considering that the oil bill for the US alone is over $700 billion a year, big as this project is, it might be a bargain.
Keith Henson
http://htyp.org/Dollar_a_gallon_gasoline
hkhenson(at)rogers(dot)com
I feel that whatever technology we might be looking at,as an alternative source of fuel against fossil fuel,it’s worth attempting.May be solar energy could be the key to this.At global level,the U.N. may constitute a fund for funding research and building proto type equipments and satellites which would enable harvest of solar energy from space with minimal loss in transmission and supply to the electricity grid.This is is the crying need for the whole world particularly in the context of rising fuel prices and rapid depletion in fossil fuel.Along side, on a minuscule level we could seriously attempt harvesting efficiently solar fuel or any other alternative power driven mechanism for our transportation needs etc. It could be attempted on a war footing again by resorting to global funding.Let’s hope and pray that this becomes a reality as soon as possible.
Sounds pretty lossy with the beam down energy dissipating with the square of the distance. Better to hang giant mirrors and do all of the transduction on the ground. Isn’t this just another source of global warming though?