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Satellite solar power plants could be coming soon to an orbit near you

Posted at 3:10 PM on 11 Oct 2007

Ooh, shiny: A federal study has concluded that orbiting solar power plants could soon become economically competitive, thanks to rising oil prices. Over a one-year period, sunlit satellites could generate nearly the equivalent of all the energy available in the world's oil reserves, says the report from the National Security Space Office. In other news, we have a National Security Space Office. Who knew?

source: Los Angeles Times

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Comments: (3 comments)

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Orbit Torrent

The apace power station idea is a waste of money and a diversion from the real work of about $1 triilion of needed energy efficiency projects in the next ten year in the USA. It costs something like $10,000 per pound to put stuff in orbit, but it is much cheaper to have four times as many square feet panels on Earth. Don't forget the pollution of the rocket fuel in the atmosphere, not a big problem with present day space flights but unacceptable with many thousands of tons of sattelites put in orbit (and hundreds of thousands of tons of rockets to put the material in orbit.) And who wants microwaves beaming down on them?

Bob Maginnis

by bobmaginnis at 11:35 AM on 12 Oct 2007

Orbit Torrent

Bob Maginnis --

Couldn't agree more. Don't tell me a whole new generation of starry eyed/naive/opportunistic folks are resurrecting this discredited bit of junk engineering. A 100MW plant in space (say 50MW delivered on the ground- and by no means a large plant ) needs something like 0.5 to 1 square kilometers of solar panels and support structure plus thousands of RF generating devices.
Think about how many shuttle trips would be required to erect this monstrosity at something like 6-10GWH energy cost per launch. And, Oh!, by the way, the present space shuttle really isn't quite big enough and could we please have a lot more of them? Yada yada. Grrr!

Mike M

by crotchety1 at 12:28 PM on 12 Oct 2007

A cause that was nobly lost when a Saturn V ...

was laid on its side, becoming the world's most expensive lawn ornament.

Maybe not lost forever. Certainly the idea can't go away. There is a competent discussion here. Pay special attention to Roger Arnold's contributions.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former H2 energy fan
Internal combustion power without exhaust --
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html

by GRLCowan at 1:21 PM on 12 Oct 2007

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