Gartner interviewed me for the article last week – here’s my part (though I don’t recall saying all the funding should go through NASA):
Arthur P. Smith, a physicist who has written about solar power from space for the American Physical Society (PDF), said that interest in beaming solar power from satellites has waxed and waned since it was first proposed more than 30 years ago. Smith said that research funding was highest during the oil crisis in the Carter administration, but after gas prices retreated the program was shelved for almost 20 years.
Pursuing solar power from space “should be part of our plan for energy independence,” Smith said. He said that if NASA invested $10 billion in research over the next 10 years, the technology would likely become cost-effective enough to begin launching satellites.
Nevill Marzwell of JPL is also quoted, among others:
The United States “doesn’t have the political will to fund the research” because of pressure from fossil-fuel lobbyists, Marzwell said. “We could have become the Saudi Arabia of the world electricity market,” Marzwell said. But because the coal and oil industries don’t want threats to their profits, they applied political pressure, causing the program to be scrapped, according to Marzwell.
Was that what happened? I wish we knew more! I wonder if the secretive Cheney Energy Task Force had anything to do with it – after all, Vice Presidents have traditionally been in charge of US space policy.
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I don’t understand. The satellites in orbit charge up batteries that they then drop down to Earth? Or maybe they use some mysterious technology to “beam” energy to various locations able to recieve it.
I can sure see that political pressure from the oil barons, the battery barons, and the nuclear power generator barons. Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, the surest sign of a conspiracy is the lack of evidence…
jon
we “beam” power by electromagnetic radiation all the time – radio, radar, lasers, etc. etc. Telescopes of various sorts capture “beams” in reverse. It’s a rather well established technology – the main problem is beam shaping by the transmitting antenna, but there’s lots of experience with techniques for that. Transmission effeciencies could potentially be as high as 60-70% or more – far better than any power line over such a distance (36,000 km from geosynchronous orbit – high-voltage power lines typically lose 10% of power every 1000 km or so).
Of course, with no funding, wireless power transmission has only been demonstrated on a very small scale – a few km at most on the ground. But there’s no physical reason it wouldn’t work.
The whole idea for wireless power transmission actually started with Tesla – see this commentary for example.
I believe US might get their asses kicked with this.
http://global.mitsubishielectric.com/bu/space/topics/solar/sol01_b.html
They start small, wise and with a global market to boot.
If you thought the furor over ordinary 60 Hz EM radiation from power lines was something, just wait ’til they attempt this. I wonder what frequency they’re considering.
Not much different from broadcast radio and TV, and cell phones right now. Beam shaping can cut the stray EM fields way down, especially at higher frequencies (optical lasers are considered seriously as an option for transmission).
Optical lasers from space could not power handheld devices, because those devices are used most often indoors. And if you are outdoors anyway, wouldn’t solar cells work just as well?
Maybe better, considering I doubt many people want to look up at the blue sky only to see a bunch of multi-colored lasers staring down at them. The sun’s light would undoubtedly be more bright than the lasers, as well.
Actually, now that I think about it, microwaves wouldn’t work either. Don’t buildings stop microwaves?
Well, as long as I get my daily dose of random radiation, it’s all good.
Also, lasers run at a single optical frequency that can be converted to power with 90%+ efficiency by tuned photovoltaics; you can’t do that with sunlight. The incoming power from a solar power satellite would likely be only a fraction of peak sunlight, but the idea is it’s a steady constant stream of energy, quite unlike the highly variable stuff you get from most renewable sources.
And the intent isn’t to power indoor devices at all, but to aim for a dedicated power-plant receiver (“rectenna” for microwave beams) that would then pipe that power off to the electrical grid for general use.
I might have entirely the wrong end of the stick – but as far as I know, the main reason that solar power hasn’t really taken off here on Earth isn’t a conspiracy on the part of the fossil fuel industry (not that I’m a fan). Its that photovoltaics have yet to become competitive economically, just in raw terms of dollar investment per kilowatt output – solar cells aren’t cheap.
I know that a solar cell in GEO can generate several times the power of the same cell in, say, Calafornia, due to almost 24-hour exposure and the lack of any atmosphere. But given the scale of launch costs today, surely there’s no way a power satellite could compete? The initial investment would have to be staggering.
I’ve always had the impression that SSP would have to follow on from an established space infrastructure, when it would be possible to build the satellites using silicon from the moon and metals from the asteroids. The cost of overcoming Earth’s gravity is just too high.
Of course I might be completely wrong – feel free to set me straight if so!
Back in the 70’s they thought you couldn’t do better than about 100 Watts/kg. But nowadays, companies have solar cells at 1000 Watts/kg or better – which means the cost of space launch only has to improve a factor of 3-10 for this to be economically competitive. The new reusable craft (Space-X for example) may put this in range next year.
does not exist for the idea that everyone on a public payroll is, without ever happening to pick up a brown paper bag that some industry rep dropped moments earlier in public trash can, and without in any other surreptitious way slurping up petrodollars, motivated to find ways of delaying oil and gas replacements.
That’s because the large payments to government from the oil and gas trades aren’t secret. See this OPEC PDF file for their estimate of how much is made on their exports, by the governments that allow them as imports.
And a search on “natural gas tax revenue” brings up this
US$1.7 billion a year estimate for what Texans pay. No web document I could find adds up what all Americans pay, and I understand gas distributors are forbidden to itemize the tax take on consumers’ invoices. So that’s a little bit secretive.
But for the most part, if the surest sign of a conspiracy is the lack of evidence, then there can’t be a civil service conspiracy to foot-drag on nuke, solar, etc. because there’s entirely too much evidence that it’s in their baser interest
— Graham Cowan
fireproof fuel, real-car range, no emissions (MS Word format) —
how individual mobility gains nuclear cachet