In order to meet our world’s rising energy needs, and to help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, some ideas that seem right out of a science fiction novel are picking up steam with start-ups and investors. But does using satellites for energy production really make sense financially or environmentally?
Space Based Solar Power (SBSP) is an idea first voiced by scientist Dr. Peter Glaser over 40 years ago, and during times of high energy costs or crises in fossil fuel supplies, the idea keeps rearing its head. The premise is that large photovoltaic arrays can be assembled in a geosynchronous orbit at 22,000 miles above the Earth, generating electricity that can then be transmitted via microwave or lasers to Earth.
On the positive side of SBSP, power can be produced 24 hours a day, regardless of the time of year, and the strength of the solar power in space is 6 to 8 times that on the surface of the planet. The drawbacks are the physical logistics and extreme expense of launching all of the materials into orbit, and the lack of an efficient, scalable system for getting the energy to Earth.
The advantages of Space Based Solar Power, according to the National Space Society :
- Unlike oil, gas, ethanol, and coal plants, space solar power does not emit greenhouse gases.
- Unlike coal and nuclear plants, space solar power does not compete for or depend upon increasingly scarce fresh water resources.
- Unlike bio-ethanol or bio-diesel, space solar power does not compete for increasingly valuable farm land or depend on natural-gas-derived fertilizer. Food can continue to be a major export instead of a fuel provider.
- Unlike nuclear power plants, space solar power will not produce hazardous waste, which needs to be stored and guarded for hundreds of years.
- Unlike terrestrial solar and wind power plants, space solar power is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in huge quantities. It works regardless of cloud cover, daylight, or wind speed.
- Unlike nuclear power plants, space solar power does not provide easy targets for terrorists.
- Unlike coal and nuclear fuels, space solar power does not require environmentally problematic mining operations.
- Space solar power will provide true energy independence for the nations that develop it, eliminating a major source of national competition for limited Earth-based energy resources.
- Space solar power will not require dependence on unstable or hostile foreign oil providers to meet energy needs, enabling us to expend resources in other ways.
- Space solar power can be exported to virtually any place in the world, and its energy can be converted for local needs — such as manufacture of methanol for use in places like rural India where there are no electric power grids. Space solar power can also be used for desalination of sea water.
- Space solar power can take advantage of our current and historic investment in aerospace expertise to expand employment opportunities in solving the difficult problems of energy security and climate change.
- Space solar power can provide a market large enough to develop the low-cost space transportation system that is required for its deployment. This, in turn, will also bring the resources of the solar system within economic reach.
Disadvantages of Space Solar Power
- High development cost. Yes, space solar power development costs will be very large, although much smaller than American military presence in the Persian Gulf or the costs of global warming, climate change, or carbon sequestration. The cost of space solar power development always needs to be compared to the cost of not developing space solar power.
A Washington company, PowerSat, plans to use a group of up to 300 satellites which then send the energy to a single satellite for transmission to Earth. PowerSat plans to be able to implement the system within 10 years. Several other firms, Space Energy and Solaren, are working toward their own systems as well.
As a layman, I have to wonder if the billions (trillions, maybe?) that will be invested to harvest and transmit renewable energy from solar panels on satellites in space wouldn’t be better spent implementing conservation efforts and developing Earth-based clean energy sources.
What happens when something needs repairing or adjusting in space? What’s the price of a service call to a solar power system based in space? (And are those frickin’ lasers safe for us pedestrians?)
For more information on Space Based Solar Power:
- International Symposium on Solar Energy from Space
- Space Future
- Space Solar Power Workshop
- Space Generation
- Center for Space Power
- Citizens for Space Based Solar Power
What do you think? Should we pursue conservation and Earth based renewables, or push on ‘to the final frontier’?
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pisses me off our government is still taking baby steps rather than investing big in the development of this not so new but yet wonderful technology and deploying this system would help our environment so much, and our people since we can share this cheap and reliable energy and stop fighting over our consumption needs and rather start working together with other countries to continue to solve issues of our pollutants by creating biodegradable plastics and transforming our garbage in landfills to energy we all want. we as conscious and intelligent humans gotta start fearing what we are doing to our planet instead of fearing our neighbors. we gotta achieve cooperation with one another and set up guidlines for freedom, survival, and happiness for everyone, so they can choose what to believe in but also so it’s not interfering with others rights and feelings..we got to care about each other because we’re all conscious individuals looking for answers in history, media, and all we’ve created and shared with one another about observations made and lessons learned, when the real answer to life is in our survival as a whole for the future to come since this is our one and only planet that allows us to live. we need to worry about fixing it and learn to terraform other planets to become habitable and so we can continue to spread our life to other planets making our destiny more secure and righteous and allowing us to live on and search for other intelligent life forms similar to our own.
I have been following the debates about power satellites since 1975.
About two months ago, I ran into the Skylon project. Used as a first stage with laser propulsion for the second stage, it looks like a transport system can deliver cargo to GEO for under $100/kg.
At that cost power satellites can be built and the power sold for 1-2 cents per kWh. That low enough to be able to make synthetic fuels for about a dollar a gallon.
The cost is uncertain, but a first pass effort at a pro forma analysis came in a bit under $60 billion.
Re your concerns, conservation won’t save enough to let us live in warm houses or travel by air. If power satellites are being built in space, there should be enough people there to service them. All the serious proposals use low density microwaves rather than lasers to get the energy back to the earth. If you are worried about not much more microwave energy than what you get from a cell phone, you can wear an aluminum foil hat, which will block the microwaves completely.
However, the propulsion lasers used to get the parts to GEO can be focused on the earth and definitely are not good for pedestrians. The beam energy is equal to a ton of TNT per second. That’s probably enough to wreck an M1 tank in a second, or at least make it too hot to use.
There is a complicated proposal for the Chinese to own the lasers which would be located in South Texas. The US would have a cutoff switch. The lasers could not be used against targets outside of the western hemisphere.
There are more details here http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5485 and here http://www.htyp.org/dtc
Keith Henson
Sounds like something straight from a scifi book, as if earth solved the power crises that way. I would think that while launching and execution would be relatively cheap (cheap in the sense that a billion dollars is pretty good investment for a near life time of energy) but the maintenance cost of doing that would be through the roof.
TV Spy: If we are constructing power satellites at a rate to replace fossil fuels (a GW every two days) then we should have the capacity to fix those that need it.
Besides, what can go wrong with one of them?
Keith
It seems to me that people conveniently forget that gathering energy from off earth, and then using it on earth, adds 100% of that collected energy to the heating of this planet.
There is no balance there. … It would start small, then people would get hooked on the energy source, and it would grow. … You can visualize the effect by imagining that each solar energy collector were just a mirror, sending its little bit of the sun to earth. Now, add a trillion little mirrors, or even a trillion trillon little mirrors, and you have a gigantic solar heater. … You can read Death-Ray, if you wish.
I do believe that collecting that energy is a good thing, but we have to use it off world, moving our total environment further out into the deepest recesses of the universe, instead of putting the life on our planet under a giant magnifying glass and burning it all away.
One of the comments that I did not agree with was the shutting down of nuclear power; there are issues but the ones mentioned are irrelevant. Salt water is perfectly viable for the nuclear power process, the boiling point is slightly higher but the amount of power generated can more than conpensate for this. Furthermore, the water is released into the air and as we all know thanks to the magic schoolbus, it will come back down in the end; if anything this will help produce more fresh water by importing salt water and boiling it! 2 birds and one stone, but that’s a discussion for later.
The above comment was for the thread! sorry I misplaced it!
Now I guess my 2 cents was voided by this mistake
Yes, but (at least as far as I understand), using helium as a working fluid avoids the potential of putting radioactive material into the environment, as helium won’t hold extra neutrons the way water does (please, someone, correct my poor understanding of this situation). Also, if there’s a reactor breach, helium rises to the top of the atmosphere, so there’s no chance of it filling up a valley and suffocating people.
Desalting water isn’t done inside a reactor. There would be terrible corrosion problems.
And the steam made from reactor heat isn’t released into the atmosphere, though you do sometimes see condensate on a cold day from water evaporated in cooling towers
The best approach might be for you read the Wikipedia article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination.
Keith Henson
Good, now maybe she will go crawl back under that rock from which she emerged!
ER
http://www.anonymize.tk
The truth is, a lot of people are obsessed with space related technology, because they’re obsessed with space exploration. Even when the related technology is clearly impractical on many levels. Space fanatics use a variety of elaborate arguments to justify this kind of technology, ignoring the legitimate data that immediately and unequivocal exposes these proposals for what they are: Absurd.
Stop fantasizing, be scientific, trust the facts:
Space development is itself an energy problem. If it was energy-economical to develop in space we wouldn’t need solar energy, we’d have all we needed.
Abundant solar energy is already available on earth at a fraction of the cost, 96,000 terawatts/year in fact, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to collect this energy in space.
A space installation would be relatively static and inaccessible and will be obsolete before it’s even completed. Terrestrial solar power however is constantly advancing, for example First Solar has just broken the $1 / watt barrier.
Unintended consequences. The infrastructure for SSP is totally speculative and unproven, failure or malfunction could be disastrous with global consequences. Terrestrial solar is safe and proven.
The energy crisis should not be used as a political tool to manipulate people into supporting space exploration!
I’ve been fascinated with the idea of SBSP for about the last fifteen years. For most of the last ten, I’ve worked in the energy industry, most recently in the renewables area. However much I am emotionally drawn to the idea of giant arrays of solar panels beaming down all our energy needs without dirtying up our planet with radioactive coal sludge, I think neotoy is right; it’s really a non-starter as far as large scale production goes. OTOH, I think we should do a proof-of-concept system to show we can do it. A lot of good science and engineering could come out of it.
Centralised solutions are so 20th century.
No doubt about it. But for better or for worse, we are stuck with 20th century infrastructure.
Keith Henson
Sweet, just like in SimCity, the microwave power plant that received energy from space was the most efficient power plant you could get. What happens if the beams are misaligned and beam energy to the wrong spot and destroy other stuff (like in the game)?
Or, what if this is just a front to build a Death Star-type satellite that can focus energy on our enemies? Super sweet.
Mr. Jones wrote:
‘Sweet, just like in SimCity, the microwave power plant that received energy from space was the most efficient power plant you could get.”
That’s true.
“What happens if the beams are misaligned and beam energy to the wrong spot and destroy other stuff (like in the game)?”
It’s so hard to focus microwave energy back to the earth that the transmitter requires a pilot beam for phase information. Someone would have to rip a pilot beam transmitter out of a rectenna and drive it away in a truck to move the beam.
And the power in the beam is only about 1/4 of sunlight. In the winter you would hardly notice it. In the summer you might want an aluminum foil hat to prevent overheating.
“Or, what if this is just a front to build a Death Star-type satellite that can focus energy on our enemies? Super sweet.”
While the microwave beam is really hard to use as a weapon, the propulsion lasers needed to get all the parts up there are a different matter. It’s not up to Death Star standards, but it does put down the energy of a ton of TNT every second. Not effective for doing in a city, but one hell of a pinpoint weapon. Having only one set of focusing mirror does keep it to the hemisphere under the focusing mirrors though.
I honestly feel like I am the only person who can make the astounding logical leap of faith, and realize that NO MATTER WHAT THE COST, space-based solar power IS FREE ENERGY FOR EV ER. Amortize any ridiculous -illion number over infinity – the cost is zero. So why do we not have this? Why wasn’t it started the minute whichever science-fiction writer or scientist or revolutionary pothead came up with the very CONCEPT?
Seriously. What is so fscking hard to understand about this? Build the system = energy to spare until the gorram sun explodes.
@gonzobot, it’s because of the whole time value of money thing. I’m guessing you’re not living off the income from an annuity. Why not? Also, solar power satellites take maintenance; you don’t just stick them up there and have them work. And the cost of that maintenance, at least with today’s technology, is huge.
“And the cost of that maintenance, at least with today’s technology, is huge.”
It’s not really a problem because with today’s technology building a power satellite would be an insane waste of money.
With the kind of transport into space we have today, a one GW, 5000 ton power power satellite at $20,000/kg ($20 M/ton) would cost $100 B just to lift it. I.e., $100/watt or $100,000/kw Paid off in ten years, the power would cost $100,000/80,000 hrs or $1.25 per kWh.
The same $100B needed to lift one power satellite on current rockets is more than enough to develop a transportation system that lowers the cost down to $100/kg, a reduction of 200 to one.
Which is why building a test power satellite with current rockets is silly. For the same money we could set up the transport to build hundreds of them.
If we are transporting a million tons a year to GEO, maintenance isn’t a big deal.
Keith
I’ve been enamored with this idea for some time, but whenever I discuss it with engineers in the CleanTech space they universally reject the concept do to cost of infrastructure and serviceability. If it happens, they say, it will be many decades in the future.
@JD Ray, see, this is exactly the mindset that is PREVENTING this sort of thing from coming to fruition. I’m pretty sure that no matter the cost, the benefit will be far greater. And ‘maintenance’ costs really shouldn’t be an issue – for starters, don’t constantly build things using the lowest bidder (AMERICA, I’m talking to you) and you won’t have to go up and fix it every five months. But in any case, why should it be so much to maintain them? A network of these satellites should not require constant maintenance – up to half could be offline at any time while the system still functions, were it designed that way. And aren’t we getting reasonably good at putting people into orbit for long periods of time? We’ve had a manned space station going for a good while now. Not to mention the, I’m going to say THOUSANDS, of other satellites that are already up there.
To me, there is simply no reason NOT for this to be happening now – we can go to orbit, we understand solar technology, we even have working models of wireless energy transfer – the only thing holding mankind back at this point seems to be mankind itself.
Global Patriot, what you might do with the CleanTech engineers is to ask them how low the lift cost to GEO would have to go for power satellites to make economic sense.
If you ask this question, please let me know where it is so I can follow the discussion.
Keith Henson
hkhenson(at)rogers.com
@gonzobot, I felt the same way you did up until just a few years ago. I still have to respectfully disagree with you on a few points, though. Regarding the ability of America to build something that lasts, I would direct your attention to the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Designed to last three months, they’ve been going as many years, even getting to the point that the public is bored with their new discoveries. We as a country can and do build things that last. Even if we couldn’t, there is expertise elsewhere in the world that can. But that doesn’t mean we can build something that lasts forever. At least not something as complicated as an SPS.
Solar panels, however sturdy their solid-state construction would indicate they are, deteriorate over time. On Earth, they have about a twenty year useful life. That’s with our atmosphere filtering out the vast majority of the harmful and unusable cosmic radiation. Their lifespan would be dramatically reduced in orbit, having a lifespan of more like six to eight years. And these solar panels make up the vast majority of the mass of an SPS, the remainder being in transmission and station keeping equipment. For a terrestrial analog, imagine if you built a dam the size of Bonneville. Then every six or eight years, you had to completely replace the concrete in the dam, but you could save the turbines and the fish ladders. Maybe you could design it so you could break the dam up into sections, replacing them one at a time in rotation, doing one section every two years or so… Doesn’t sound too good, does it?
Another issue is that market-rate generation assets need to be sized right around 500 MW to be useful. An asset that produces over a thousand MW creates too much exposure when the plant goes offline for maintenance or due to a catastrophe. Less than 200 MW units are hard to schedule, particularly when you need several of them to make up the body of a transaction that’s six hundred megs or more.
Solar power from space may seem like a good idea at first blush. Unfortunately, the devil is in the details. One of those details, the fact that we live in a Capitalist (market-driven) society means that one of the significant cost factors with developing and deploying an SPS will need to change dramatically for an implementation to make sense. The cost per kg of orbiting material, the durability of solar panels, and the conversion efficiency of solar panels are three of many significant factors.
The relatively low up-front cost of implementing terrestrial power generation using known technologies is another challenge that SPS technology has to overcome to be viable. For instance, wind power runs around $500,000 per MW of capacity, and that’s considered very expensive. At a two percent net energy conversion rate for an SPS (after solar panel efficiency loss, transmission loss, DC to AC conversion loss, etc.), the cost to implement a market-viable system is overwhelmingly large. I think we’re better off putting our money into developing better nuclear technology. We know how to make THAT clean, we just don’t, mostly out of fear that it might be weaponized, even though it already has been. If you want to argue for something, argue for that.
JD Ray, few comments.
“Solar panels, . . . deteriorate over time.”
That’s true. We can either have a replacement program or just build solar thermal. Thermal plants are competitive with solar cells on earth, no reason they would not be in space. And thermal plants often last for 50 years.
“Another issue is that market-rate generation assets need to be sized right around 500 MW to be useful.”
Because there is no fuel costs, the economics of operating power satellites is very different from earth based coal plants. We would operate space based solar plants at full capacity all the time and vary the *load.* How? Divert any power you don’t need at the moment into making hydrogen. Then use the hydrogen plus CO2 out of the air to make synthetic oil to feed to current oil refineries. Thus a one or even a 5 GW unit can operate just fine at 200 MW.
Eventually space based solar power will be sized for peak load and well beyond and the main draw would be making synthetic oil. Lose a few 5 GW units and you just make a little less oil that day.
“Solar power from space may seem like a good idea at first blush. Unfortunately, the devil is in the details. One of those details, the fact that we live in a Capitalist (market-driven) society means that one of the significant cost factors with developing and deploying an SPS will need to change dramatically for an implementation to make sense. The cost per kg of orbiting material, the durability of solar panels, and the conversion efficiency of solar panels are three of many significant factors.”
Solar thermal is nearly 4 times the efficiency of solar cells. You definitely nailed the main factor, cost per kg to GEO. In my design to cost work, I found that a target of $100/kg is about right. At that lift cost, power can be priced at 1-2 cents per kWh.
“The relatively low up-front cost of implementing terrestrial power generation using known technologies is another challenge that SPS technology has to overcome to be viable.”
Exactly. For space based solar power to attract the investment it takes, it should be able to make power for perhaps half the cost of the next most expensive option.
“For instance, wind power runs around $500,000 per MW of capacity, and that’s considered very expensive.”
That’s $500/kW which is a very good price if you could get it all the time. On a capital investment of $800/kW you pay off the investment in ten years at a penny per kWh. What power per MW of capacity can you get in a year from wind?
“At a two percent net energy conversion rate for an SPS (after solar panel efficiency loss, transmission loss, DC to AC conversion loss, etc.),”
The worst I can imagine is 15% solar cells feeding a 50% efficient electricity to electricity transmission chain. More likely would be 60% thermal cycle, 30% after transmission. But when the “fuel” is free, the only cost is capital equipment.
“the cost to implement a market-viable system is overwhelmingly large. I think we’re better off putting our money into developing better nuclear technology. We know how to make THAT clean, we just don’t, mostly out of fear that it might be weaponized, even though it already has been. If you want to argue for something, argue for that.”
Done the only way I know to get the cost down, the power satellite propulsion lasers *are* weapons. But I agree with you, nuclear perhaps 5 cents a kWh is the next best choice.
The trouble is you are never going to make dollar a gallon liquid fuels on 5 cent a kWh nuclear electricity.
Keith
Nice post. Looks like wind power is really starting to get some serious consideration in Australia now.
I think that real solar plants on orbit will not be sooner than first commercial space elevator appear. Till that time space energy generation will be good idea only. Not more.