And he also wrote a somewhat related article about space based manufacturing/mining. Basically however you calculate and whatever imaginary tech you use, it is still cheaper to do practically anything on the Earth surface than anywhere else.
We discussed this in one of my EE courses. From what I recall, all of the United State's power could be compressed down to a beam something like 15 meters in diameter. However, the problem is that if you compress it more than that the air will ionize. Effectively, an orbital solar beam could also be used as a lightning gun which is something the international community might have an issue with.
They tried building on mountain faces but shoddy construction by yakuza linked companies lead to landslides[0] and many dead people a couple of years ago.
For the record, I live in a remote mountainous (snowy) region and have panels generating 10kw on my roof. It generates really well 8 months out of the year. 2 months of snow and another couple of months for the rainy season and I’m still generating more than I use in a year. If the govt is willing to reintroduce subsidies and raise the fees in tariffs, a lot more people would be willing to install them.
What about off-shore solar farms? These couldn't trigger the same NIMBY response (which I'm not sure the Japanese good-for-society mindset would have). Some problems would be sea spray corrosion, but that could be obviated by building them high enough. If that is a problem for visual environment preservation, they could be just over the horizon, and all linked to one main power transmission cable.
But you really depend on the grid for energy storage it seems. There is no technology available to consumers that can load shift and/or store energy for 2 months.
In practice, this means you waste your excess electricity (or perhaps, sell it to the grid so that someone else can use it), but then still rely upon Natural Gas peakers for those other two months.
> If the govt is willing to reintroduce subsidies and raise the fees in tariffs, a lot more people would be willing to install them.
More solar in this scenario means that everyone involved runs out of electricity in those 2 months.
A degree of the grid can be solar, but not everybody. We should get as many people on solar as is reasonable, but energy storage (especially on the scale of months) simply is science fiction.
Back in the real world, there will be 2 months+ of fossil fuels to support the lifestyle you've chosen. It's better than 12 months of fossil fuels, but we aren't at a technological level where we can ignore the natural gas plants quite yet.
> Back in the real world, there will be 2 months+ of fossil fuels to support the lifestyle you've chosen.
Nuclear, hydroelectric, etc. Lots of places do not get a majority of their electricity from fossil fuels. Washington (and Canada) use a ton of hydro power. https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WA
Hydro is great when the geography and water-rights can handle it.
Washington has not only lots of mountains and streams... it has excess water. Excess that can be used for energy storage.
In contrast, the Colorado River / Hoover Dam may generate a ton of electricity. But if you slurp up water in reverse, you might have a riot. The Colorado River water rights are oversold, there's not enough water to satisfy everybody.
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Nuclear cannot spin up or down economically. Well... okay. It can shut itself off and spin down, but its... not economical. When you spend $Billions on a plant, and it shuts down, you lose a lot of energy in practice.
Nuclear Plant economics are about running the plant at 100% as much as possible, in the hopes of making back the money you spent to build the darn thing in the first place.
If you're shutting down Nuclear Plants 10-months of the year, and only spinning them up for the 2-months where solar is inadequate, the nuclear power plants will go out of business rather quickly. They're just too expensive to build, and the fuel costs are basically nil (so you might as well run nuclear for all 12-months of the year).
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Natural Gas peakers are the opposite. The fuel is very expensive, but the plants are very cheap. You can in fact, run a peaker the minority of the time. Maybe only 20% or 30% of the year, and still make plenty of money.
So when we are realistically talking about "Oh, my energy needs work for 10 months, but just gotta figure out the last 2 months of the year", the solution is always going to be natural gas.
Yes, pumped Hydro is good. But in practice, seems to only store energy for "days", not "months".
Furthermore, water restrictions (especially in the West) force the dams to release water even when electricity isn't needed. Because people need water to drink. A dam can serve multiple masters... but one of those masters will take priority. In most cases, water-rights will take priority over energy storage.
That is to say: we can't store energy reliably in dams that are being used for water rights management. We can release water _and_ generate electricity, but the "choice" as to water rights management vs energy storage is contradictory. Storing energy longer means "not releasing water". While serving the water/drinking needs of the downstream communities means "releasing the water".
Do you have an example of a place where that is a significant issue? The upstream flow is the same as it was before a dam is built. You’d imagine this would only become a problem if nearly the entire flow was being consumed, which is unthinkable.
You're not a rocket scientist but you're absolutely right.
It's cheaper to tear down the microwave receiver and put up solar panels and batteries than it is to send solar panels to space to beam power back to the microwave receiver. You'd have to beam 1000x the power that solar panels receive to justify the cost of sending things to space, but at that point you're lifting 100x more panels to space to get the 10x bonus, and lifing / installing them in space at 10,000x the cost or worse... Plus they have to be magical perfect installations that never fail and work perfectly.
Again cheaper to put that money into more batteries and panels..
That's probably an exaggeration by this time. Lift costs are decreasing geometrically. Solar efficiency is going up constantly. Land and eminent domain groundside continue to go up.
All the variables are moving in the direction to benefit orbital solar, and will continue to go that way. It's not so much a matter of whether it's cheaper in space, than when it is cheaper in space. And it won't be long now.
Every reduction in solar cost makes it more efficient to buy panels on earth.
The installation cost for space is so much more than the installation cost for earth. Even at 10x the cost, which is orders of magnitude off, what do we have?
We have a system in space at 10 the cost that needs a solar array sized receiving plant (double the cost) and has transmission losses (increase size of space and ground installations to offset).
It would have to be nearly the same cost or cheaper to install in space than on a field in, say, Kansas. Its a ludicrous proposition.
Those are the numbers that are changing. Transmission losses have become fairly tiny. The 'ludicrous proposition' is similar to the turn-of-the-century folk who yelled 'get a horse!'
Well, I'm open to new numbers. I'll have to re-read TFA and dive deeper at some point. But last time I checked, and last time I asked smarter people than me what they thought, it was quite a ways off.
Maybe doing compromise - build space mirror and beam light to earth 24 hours per day, as bonus panels maintenance it on earth and can be easily upgraded.
Limiting your future and imagination based on what is possible and practical right now is not how we advance as a civilization.
Presumably, they believe there will be advances in technology such as space based construction techniques or mining asteroids for resources that will make it a viable option.
The other thing that would be cheaper would be building molten salt cooled nuclear reactors, instead of continuing to use the water cooled once that are so prone to hydrogen explosions. I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I suspect you may even be able to re-use a lot of existing infrastructure in the process.
Could even be safer if their system for beaming electricity has the potential to be compressed to a point where it turns it into a lightning gun.
Japan's getting creative since they currently important a large amount of their energy in the form of fuels on ships.
That is not gonna last if they want to continue decarbonizing.
They are averse to nuclear, they are an island, and they don't have a great relationship with most of their neighbours from whom they could import electricity directly. So instead they have crazy things like this and hydrogen.
The only use case for this that comes anywhere close to being viable is if the alternative is flying in fossil fuels to run a generator. IOW, polar regions and forward military bases.
The hope is that space based manufacturing will eventually make this technology viable more widely.
Man, there's got to be some passive cooling Einstein-Szilard hijinks that could be gotten on the backside of those hot-climate panels. Seems like a pity if not . . although, devil's advocate, solar viability more or less hinges on dirt-cheap panels, and having some kind of whiz-bang passive cooling on the backside is going to screw with that a whole bunch.
Solar power is solar power. I don't care if it's a bunch of mirrors pointed at molten salt, or if it's from a silicon panel. What I only really care about is efficacy, efficiency, and power numbers.
The mirrors and salt thing is surprisingly doable. There's a few plants in various deserts that prove it to be cost effective.
Is it a good idea to put more solar irradiation onto Earth than we already have? I thought climate change was due to us causing accumulation of solar that would otherwise diffuse into space.
Assuming they're not shading Earth, robbing someone else of sun. Are they? Is Mr Burns' solar blackout machine becoming a thing?
I guess depends what wavelengths are used. If it is something not absorbed by the atmosphere then the argument is moot. I think some microwave lengths for the bill.
Why does it have to be absorbed by the atmosphere to be a problem?
If the energy reaches the surface, and is absorbed there, it will eventually become heat as we use it. At that point, we've added heat to a system we're actively trying to cool.
Curious question, why not use this approach for example with wind farms or solar farms? You'd avoid the need to build high capacity cables which are sometimes a reason why renewables do not spread that much. I can imagine that coming into contact with this beam is not something anyone would wish for.
You could beam energy up to a station in the orbit which would then redirect it to the place where energy is needed. You could then get "easily" energy from solar farms in Sahara, for example.
What would that satellite look like to enable meaningful power transmission? A bank of capacitors and batteries? Would have multiple smaller sats scale better and/or increase coverage?
Aren’t we trying to manage the energy we already get, and maybe even get less energy? Isn’t it that at the current rates with our modified atmosphere we are going to cook ourselves ?
The big problem is the peaky-ness of the current renewables.
They're either very weather dependent, ecologically intensive or time dependent.
This solves a lot of this by moving the actual capture above us, into geostationary orbit where there's still plenty of space and by using microwaves (rather than traditional light) you can avoid clouds.
They already possess fossil fuel plants that can be turned on for those rare occasions where nothing else is working. If they run only 1% of the time it is the least important problem. Even if they run 10% of the time it's still a massive decrease in CO2, without requiring putting things in orbit.
I would say it replaces one problem with 1000 harder ones. Space based solar power just doesn't make a ton of sense, either from a capacity or cost per watt-hour sense.
Solar panels are ~40% efficient. So they capture and beam 40% of the energy, and the other 60% gets reflected away and/or radiated as heat. Reflected energy won't hit Earth. Some of the heat will be radiated to Earth and some won't.
Question....if satellite TV that already beams microwaves to earth has issues during cloud cover...how will this be any better? Sure the power may blast through but the efficiency of that will drop depending on the weather.
Well, I guess progress is progress. If you don't try, you won't know. You keep going until you get it.
However here is an idea, what about using this for, i don't know, powering habitats etc on the Moon?
"Microwave" is a big range, from 1 to 1000 GHz. Satellite TV is in the ~10-20 GHz range, but I believe there are frequencies where clouds and rain are more transparent.
> However, even if Japan successfully deploys a set of orbital solar arrays, the tech would still be closer to science fiction than fact. That’s because producing an array that can generate 1 gigawatt of power – or about the output of one nuclear reactor – would cost about $7 billion with currently available technologies.
These beams contain 1/4 of peak solar energy at more benign wavelengths. Long term exposure is probably safe but might not be. Any amount of time measured in any unit less than years will be safe.
Yes if you climb the barb wire fence and ignore the "keep out" signs and then put up a tent and sleep there for a year you will probably slightly increase your chance of getting cancer.
The beams could be quite narrow. We did the calculations in a course I took and from what I recall, all of America's power could be compressed to a 15 meter beam. So they could probably just setup a no fly zone around the beam. Birds might still be a problem, but don't the alternatives (e.g. wind power) already kill birds?
Lets say Im not very interested in practicality but just the theory of this. How does it work? How can I send power from one side of my room to the other if I don't care about paying more.
Unfortunately, it's been too long for me to speak with authority on the specifics of what energy levels would be safe to do that for. However, from what I recall, in general there shouldn't be anything preventing that at reasonably low power levels. You could also use something like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waveguide_(radio_frequency)
Lots of doubt. But don't doubt this: anybody who bets against orbital solar will lose, and it won't take long. The costs are all going in the direction to make space-based solar the winning option.
Really? We need to cite the worldwide phenomenon of drastically reducing lift costs? Astronomical growth in cheap thin solar panels? Rising real estate prices?
No. No I'm not going to dignify this with a 'citation'.
We lived on only solar power for 7 years. For the last 2 years if I hadn't had my precious Honda GK200 petrol/kerosene generator, it would have made it quite impossible to use a desktop computer effectively. My whole successful career of 20 years as a software dev might have got upset,
Betting on solar is a silly idea. Its just a way for oil companies to keep shipping baseload
Could this be used to beam power to electric planes or cargo ships? I would think that it could be useful for vehicles that require more range than batteries currently allow.
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