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Space-Based Solar Power
🕑 Added 2023-04-15 12:00:03 +0000 UTC[This is a transcript with references.]
Solar power is a nice idea. Except for the issue with the clouds. And the nights. So, how about we instead put solar panels up in space and then beam the energy down? This futuristic idea is known as “Space Based Solar Power”. It’s been around since the 1960s, but in recent years several nations have launched projects to make it reality. I think they’re not kidding. Space-Based Solar Power is about to become a real thing. But how is it supposed to work? Is it a good idea to beam energy down from space? What are the pros and cons? That’s what we’ll talk about today.
Why’d you want to put a solar power plant into space, when you could as well put it right here down on earth where we need it? Said no British person ever. Solar power might be great if you live in the Australian outback, but not every part of the planet gets sunshine that reliably.
It’s therefore maybe not so surprising that the British are on the forefront of this race. In 2021, the UK Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy asked the consulting agency Frazer Nash for a feasibility-assessment of space based solar power.
The agency pointed out that both space launches and solar panels have become dramatically cheaper, and that we now have the technology to assemble large facilities in space from small modules. The combination of those three factors has brought down the cost of space based solar power so much that it’s now an option to seriously consider.
The analysis concludes that “it is feasible to realise a constellation of solar power satellites delivering a substantial percentage of the UK’s energy needs by the early 2040s”. They titled their report “De-risking the pathway to Net Zero”. I hope the Oxford Dictionary called to have a word with them.
Once the report was done, they didn’t hesitate. Last year, the Brits founded the UK Space Energy Initiative to get solar power to space. It’s a collaboration of nearly fifty companies and research institutions, including Airbus, Cambridge University, and Lockheed Martin.
But the Brits aren’t the only ones who are pushing forward with the idea. China has an ambitious initiative for space based solar power. Indeed, they announced last year in June that they hope to complete it two years ahead of schedule.
In 2028, they want to do the first experiment to demonstrate power-transmission from a satellite to earth, and by 2030, they want to have a power station in orbit. The Japanese Company Japan Space Systems wants to get it done even earlier, by 2025.
Just in November 2022, the European Space Agency launched a project called SOLARIS with the somewhat passive-aggressive tagline “towards a clean and secure energy future for European citizens.” Its purpose is to explore the economic, political, and technological feasibility of developing a Space Based Solar Power program within the next decade. But only for European citizens. If you can’t present your passport at the wall socket, you’ll have to launch your own satellite, dammit.
They want to come to a decision on whether to proceed by 2025, which hopefully explains why the Brits left the European Union. But leaving aside the EU, the field has been moving incredibly quickly.
The Americans decided last year that if the UK, the European Union, China, and Japan are in the game they have to play it too. So basically, everyone’s doing it because they think everyone else is doing it, which about sums up my recollection of high school.NASA announced in May 2022 that they are working on a report that will re-examine space based solar power, and the American Foreign Policy council recently stressed the military applications. A space-based solar power station could be used, for example, to remotely recharge drones.
A 2021 analysis valued the global market for space-based solar power at about 450 million dollars, and projected it to reach 850 million by 2029. I think seeing how much happened last year this is likely to be an underestimate.
But how does it work? Here’s the basic idea. You launch the power station piecewise into space and assemble the pieces in a geostationary orbit. That’s an orbit around the equator at about 36 thousand kilometres !altitude. An object on such an orbit remains in a fixed position relative to the surface without requiring propulsion, and it’ll be in the sunlight more than 99 percent of the time.
You collect the solar energy up there, convert into electromagnetic waves, and send a beam of that to your ground station. The ground station is basically an array of receiving antennas, or “rectennas” for short. To make sure that the beam doesn’t go astray, the ground station emits a target signal that the space-station can aim at.
The options that have been proposed for the beam are either a laser or microwaves. The benefit of a laser would be that it spreads less during transmission. However, the problem with lasers is that they are expensive and inefficient. This is why at the moment pretty much all designs use microwave beams instead.
The frequency of the microwave beam is typically a few GigaHertz, that’s similar to what your microwave or wireless router works with. It’s a good frequency range because the atmosphere of Earth is almost transparent in this range.
The intensity in the centre of the beam is typically around some hundred watts per square meter. For comparison, the sunlight intensity on the equator can be as high as 1000 Watts per square meter, whereas a cloudy winter day in the UK makes it to maybe 100. So beaming that power down from space is probably not going to make the pigeons fall out of the sky deep fried.
However, the comparison with sunlight is somewhat misleading because in the beam all this energy is in microwaves, and microwaves interact with objects differently than sunlight. Depending on the exact wavelength, microwaves can enter living tissue up to some centimetres of depth. So a better comparison than sunlight may be your wireless router. At a distance of about 1 meter, it emits typically a few tens to a few hundred microwatts per square meter. The beam from those stations delivers a million times more.
The major design challenge for those solar arrays in space is that the panels need to be oriented towards the sun, whereas the beam needs to be oriented towards earth. And also, you don’t want one part of the thing to cast a shadow on another part. There are several ways that scientists and engineers have come up to get this done.
The Chinese researcher Hou Xinbin put forward what’s called the Multi-Rotary Joints SPS. That’s basically a line of solar panels that can rotate independently. That way, the panels can be oriented towards the sun while the transmitter points at the ground station. This system would weigh about ten thousand tons and be twelve kilometres long.
The American John Mankins proposed a design called SPS ALPHA that keeps the solar panel and the transmitter in a fixed place, but has several thousand adjustable mirrors that focus the light on the solar panel. The mirrors surround the panels in concentric rings that take on the shape of a cocktail glass. And no, this isn’t just my association – I wonder why you’d think that. This is how it was called in the scientific literature. The thing would have a diameter of almost two kilometres and weigh approximately 8000 tons.
And the British Ian Cash has proposed a design called CASSIOpeia which stands for Constant Aperture, Solid-State, Integrated, Orbital Phased Array. Can we all agree that trying to be smart with acronyms has gone too far? Cassiopeia has the shape of a helix with a solar collector on each end. Its diameter would be almost two kilometres, and it’d weigh about 2000 tons. Cash says the benefit of his design is that there are no parts that have to be adjusted, which means there are fewer bits that can break.
That’s the part that sits in space. The size of the receiver array depends on how much you want to beam down from space, but it’s typically a few square kilometres up to 100 square kilometres, so it ain’t small. The British plan for example estimates 87 square kilometers, that’s roughly the size of Manhattan. This power station could generate two Giga Watts, which is about as much as the power delivered by one nuclear power plant.
Then let’s look at the pros and cons, starting with the pros.
The most obvious benefits are that, besides the production process, this technology doesn’t emit carbon dioxide or any other pollution. There’s also that space-based solar power can operate 24/7. I wouldn’t exactly call this a benefit, it’s rather the absence of a disadvantage, but your mileage may vary.
Another benefit is that it diversifies energy sources which decreases dependence on any one of them. As we’ve previously seen, it could have military applications. It could also generally be beneficial for space exploration and commercialization, and it could have unexpected spin offs. Apparently, that’s an argument which isn’t only popular among particle physicists.
And finally if you park your solar panels in space, you don’t need to worry about theft or vandalism, at least not until the man in the moon finds out what we’ve been up to.
Let’s then talk about the cons. Yes, as you’ve guessed, the idea has a few problems.
First of all there’s the costs. It costs a lot of money to shoot all that stuff into space and that makes space based solar power expensive. The previously mentioned report from Frazer-Nash consulting put the costs of such a space-based power plant at about 16 billion British pound. You may think that’s a lot but it’s still far less than the cost for the new particle collider that they want to build at CERN.
Of course the total cost isn’t all that relevant if the thing just runs long enough. In the end you care about the costs per power. The report estimates that if you build several of those things, and the systems are maintained and run for 100 years, the costs would ideally go down to about 50 pound per Mega Watt hour. That’d be only mildly more expensive than ground based solar power and less expensive than nuclear, or gas with carbon capture. *If the thing runs for 100 years. That seems a pretty big if to me.
A study commissioned by ESA found a comparable number of 69 Euro per Mega Watt hour for the first system, but that in the long run the costs could go down to 49 Euro. So that’s quite similar to the British estimate.
The costs don’t just come from the launch, they also come from the maintenance. The issue is there’s stuff flying around in space, space debris and micrometeorites, that are going to damage the solar panels. This question isn’t *if it will happen but just how often.
Besides that, there’s radiation from outer space that’ll degrade the material, dust that you need to somehow get off, and huge temperature gradients that’ll put stress on the material. And up in space you can’t just send Jack to put some duct tape around the thing.You’ll need some kind of autonomous space robot to get the job done.
Then there is the issue of efficiency. First you need to convert the solar energy into microwaves, then you need to send the microwaves over 36 thousand kilometres, then you need to convert them back into electricity. This process is incredibly lossy and the costs per generated power will crucially depend on this efficiency.
So what does the Frazer Nash report say about this? Well, the short summary with the pretty design says that the “concepts studied have assumed realistic efficiency values”. This statement is decorated with a reference to another report. If you look into that other report, it just says “Further work is needed to confirm that high efficiency and accuracy beam forming is possible over long distances” and they rate the task with difficulty “very high”. In other words, they have assumed some number that they have no way of knowing is even remotely correct.
A final issue that already came up is that the receiver on the ground takes up a lot of space.
In summary. I guess you already noticed that I don’t think this idea’ll go anywhere. There are people protesting against using agricultural area for solar power already, some freak out over 5G, and others believe that wind turbines give them heart arrhythmia. Do you really think they’re going to let you build a 100 square kilometre receiver for a big microwave beam coming down from the sky. Maybe in China, but not here.
Yeah, Sabine’s spitting big words today. But where’s the fun of being on YouTube if we can’t look back in ten years to see whether I was right or wrong. Would you invest into this technology? Let me know in the comments.
Comments
Commercially viable, they say here... https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/solar-panels-space-sun-energy-b2439041.html
I agree, thanks for informing and talk
Thomas, those accidents were all preventable, the US NAvy has had no accidents and that is no accident! The IFR cannot melt down and the potential problems from the use of liquid Na are engineering problems that can be addressed by proper engineering. Transparent leadership would counter any disinformation, but we lack that and it will be our downfall.
D Brown, I agree that EVs will be part of the solution, but we also need viable alternatives, such as fuel cell, hydrogen gas, etc. America has rejected ANY form of government leadership in the name of the mythical 'market forces' because we are just too damn stupid or ideological.
Thank you, Jeffrey, I'll look for. IFR might be a solution, not using a high amount of uranium, but, as D. says, we need more than one way. About nuclear a lot mistakes were made in the last decades: It was told, in a million years there wouldn't happen any accident, high gambled up, then we saw Sellafield, Harrisburg, Tschernobyl, Fukushima, just the most prominent. This policy of disinformation led to a deep scepticism in the population, you can't switch in some months.
Haha, thank you for informing, hope I didn't hurt someone, but in this way, the transport could be a bit decarbonized. Just remembered my childhood, liked very much the western-movies about rail building in the Plains in the pioneer days. Great tradition, could be revived.
D Brown
Jeffery Biss: "We really need a change in worldview ..." Agreed. My point is EVs will be part of the solution, but not in its current form. We are not really serious yet, and it will likely take a "drastic" world altering event before a positive impact is made. P.S: I watched most of the video and I had seen others that are similar.
Trains...in the US...look out Thomas, you're sticking your finger into a real sore spot for us :-). The only "real" train transportation we have is on the east coast; the high-speed Acela trains are generally well-liked. But, everywhere else in the US, the rails are owned by the cargo companies and our only rail service, Amtrak, is forced to run slow at odd times to odd locations. I suspect this is on purpose; the automakers bribed the politicians a long, long time ago and now we're stuck with shitty rail service. For this same reason, we will never build passenger-specific rail and Amtrak will continue to be a government-subsidized useless form of transport across most of the US. Oh, and I can carry my guns anywhere I want in my truck, but I can't bear arms on a train -- ahh, guns and trucks, that's America -- who cares if kids are getting shot up in schools. \end{political rant}
Thomas, Happy Tuesday! Yes the IFR is a PROVEN design that simply requires an engineering effort to scale it up to commercial scale. - Read 'Plentiful Energy: The Story of the Integral Fast Reactor: The complex history of a simple reactor technology, with emphasis on its scientific bases for non-specialists' by Charles E. Till and Yoon Il Chang (https://www.amazon.com/Plentiful-Energy-technology-scientific-non-specialists/dp/1466384603/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=plentiful+energy&qid=1681829049&sr=8-2) - Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIeE9NMP8Oc&pp=ygUGZWJyIGlp The program was shut down in 1994 because people didn't understand the problems that we were creating.
D Brown, Happy Tuesday! About EV complaints, watch that youtube video that I link to. There are monumental resource problems associated with electrification, ranging from the fact that there is no recycling program for PV panels to the low grade ores. We really need a change in worldview that overrides the delusion that we currently suffer from as a result of not encountering societal collapse.
Urgh. I got through about 20 seconds. I couldn't stomach the fulsome falsehood that Bezos gives a fart about Earth's wellbeing.
Yes, that's right, but what about building more train lines, there's place enough for lots of high speed trains in the US, isn't it?
I'd shill but I doubt Sabine would pay me so I'll just fangirl instead.
Well Jeffrey, you name a lot of problems, some are easier to solve, like meat-eating or virus-fighting, some are not, like reduce population. IFR is a sort of FastBreedReactor, I guess? But they are not accepted in the population. One was constructed in Germany, when it was ready, it was closed immediately without ever working, seven billion € were burned.
OK, one more thing. Here is a report by the US Geological Survey about the resources needed to make batteries to electrify the US car fleet: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/100-day-supply-chain-review-report.pdf It doesn't look good.
D Brown
Tracey DeLaney: You mention the results of the first-to-market EV version 1 crowd. Anyone who builds an EV that can go 200 mph is not concerned about the environment. They are in it for profit, not to save the environment. I am hoping someone in R&D comes up with a EV design that does not solve one problem by creating a different problem, which is what we have now.
D Brown
Only if you think that way.
D Brown
I am seeing complaints about EV version 1. Where will EV be in 20 years? What if R&D created a vehicle that could be solar powered during the day, and ran off off battery backup at night and on cloudy days. We do not need EVs that go 200mph, and designing them to do so cannot be in our best interest. In think in the EV arena we seeing the results of a first-to-market mentality. It is my hope that the more established auto makers who are taking a slower approach are actually considering the ultimate goal of moving to an EV centric society.
D Brown
Thanks. Greta is a great person, so much so that I think she should have won the Nobel prize.
Hi Tracy, glad to hear, just read the last chapter and I'm enthused. Hope that it will find a lot of readers, understandable for everyone. My thanks and congratulations to Sabine for her human, hopeful and clear thinking.
Sorry D., I'm not Greta, but I like her and I do back you up
Right Tracy, and never can work. There's a lot math and physics against it, Sabine could explain better. Even the ideas of space elevators never were realized, although just needed for much nearer orbits, so far I just joked
One more thing, if you watch these videos about the Venus Project: https://www.youtube.com/@TheVenusProjectGlobal You'll notice that Jacques Fresco talks about developing a 'resource based economy' that I couldn't understand until I came upon the IFR, I then could see humanity developing one if we reduced the human load and replaced our extractive economy with a closed-loop sustainable economy. That ability to actually do it is supported by the book 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years' by David Graeber (https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years-ebook/dp/B00Q1HZMCW/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=debt&s=books&sr=1-4) as humans existed in such an economic and social system for most of our history, the previous 250,000 years.
I have my copy, but haven't gotten to it yet. I just finished Maynard Keynes book about his fears about the Versailles Treaty's effects on Germany. I have felt that as the ultimate cause of WWII and his arguments back me up. There are just too many books and too little time! Her book is next.
About the IFR, from your lips to god's ear. My hypothesis about the lack of such a solution is libertarianism, Calvinism. Each posits that the wealthy elite are the true leaders because they are more industrious, libertarianism, or righteous, Calvinism, and so government must not butt in. That laissez-faire bullshit. Also, there is the greater religious and secular humanist doctrine that the universe was created for us and so we are free to live as we choose, we can reject a 'greater good' option for a selfish one as we wish. So, here we are.
Regarding batteries, copper, etc to support transition to electric, that video that I linked to discusses the supply issues, such as we down to 1% ores, which indicate that we're in a mess. People do not understand the scale of the problem because economists have been running the discussion and they live in a fantasy world in which 'innovation' will always provide a solution when the market demands it. Bullshit. We have and have had no leadership because the vast majority of people have been deluded into that economists' wet dream based on ideology without any regard to reality. Ultimately, it is the religious foundations of economics that is to blame as it provided the moral foundations for economic theory and as most religions promote a human-centric mindset, so goes economic theory.
1. Sabine, how did you know that I prefer my pigeons deep fried? 2. Some of my best friends are acronyms. 3. Space-based solar makes very little sense. I have nothing more to add to the conversation; everybody else, either here or YouTube or elsewhere on social media have called out all of the problems and they greatly outweigh any benefits at this time -- or even in 10 or 20 years time. In particular, 1. we don't need any more space debris and 2. the decreasing costs of ground-based solar coupled with the increased efficiency means that any space-based array will quickly become obsolete and much too expensive to maintain.
Oh, come now Jeffery, stop making sensible comments! We're debating the feasibility of pie-in-the-sky ideas dreamed up by sci-fi writers many, many decades ago. If anything, we should be bitching about our lack of flying cars and whether such a car should be powered by a small fusion reactor. Seriously, though, after reading that government report you pointed to many weeks ago, I am completely dumbfounded as to why IFRs haven't taken off. It just makes no sense, well, except for the interference of lobbyists and the general apprehension of all things "nuclear" by politicians and the general public.
Hi Thomas, I just perused the comments on YouTube and elsewhere and saw the same idea pop up. Some complained that, since carbon fiber isn't a great electrical conductor, the cable would need to be far heavier to transmit the power to the ground efficiently. My real concern with a big cable is that it then becomes a much easier military target, or non-malicious target of errant space debris.
David, I agree in principle that the move to electric vehicles is what is needed. However, when I see the environmental impacts of battery production, it makes me cringe. I also wonder about the ability of the electrical grid to support a significant increase in EVs. Around here, the environmentalists STOPPED a project to upgrade our power lines because of NIMBY but they are the exact sort of people who want more EVs -- ahh hypocrisy... It's the same thing with governments, though. Big oil/coal lines politician's pockets so they pay lip service to EVs but never actually make any other policy changes that will be needed to support an actual move to primarily EV transportation.
UK is a member state of ESA, so I understand that somehow they are participating also in the SOLARIS project study. Solar power is the only option in orbit, for the factories that Jeff Bezos plans to build, moving all industrial activity to orbit and leaving the Earth as a garden for rich people, while the rest of us live in orbit working hard, trying to buy the right to live on Earth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91KTUAXuzqc
Hey everyone, I finally got around to reading my March Physics Today and to my pleasant surprise, they have a review of Existential Physics. I enjoyed the book and so did the reviewer (https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.5199). I swear I'm not a shill for Sabine, but if anyone hasn't read the book yet, perhaps this review will convince you to give it a shot.
Mr. Breeze
It's all rather bleak.
There are really huge problems in producing electric cars as discussed in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOEGKDVvsg We have created an extractive economy that has created huge environmental problems that nobody but industry insiders, in this case, those involved in mining, have any idea exist. We really need to change everything that we do, such as replacing our extractive economy with a sustainable one that closes all loops between waste and manufacturing, end meat eating, reduce the human load to well below 2 billion, develop a space mining program to exploit asteroids to end mining on earth, etc. We are driving an extinction event, they occur over a period of time as we are experiencing, that will result in collapse of civilization when enough species enter functional extinction and ecosystems start to collapse. Consider the problems that the small scale event of the SARS-CoV-2 virus pandemic caused, Covid-19 was mild compared to the Black Death. The economic shocks were enormous. Now consider the effects of solitary bees dropping to insignificant numbers would have, or that krill populations drop. We would be in far more severe trouble and no one seems to understand that.
We have already invested in and proven the design of the integral fast reactor. All it needs is funding to scale it up to commercial scale of about 2500 MW. Fusion has too many problems to be overcome before it could actually provide anything remotely approaching what any current nuclear reactor can produce.
Again, the best choice is to fund the development of a commercial scale integral fast reactor that was proven capable and inherently safe in 1986. It would end the need for all fossil fuels, produce its own fuel and deal with the current nuclear waste and it could then be replaced by fusion reactors, if they are ever feasible.
Some YouTube comments suggest a space cable, similar to the idea of a space elevator. Nice idea, 36000km to the geo-stationary orbit, but perhaps more realistic than the ray-transmission
Mr. Breeze
Jebus, the first thing I imagined was a death ray tearing across the face of the earth and tossing up a mile-wide rooster tail of dirt and debris. Maybe I should stop watching scifi and switch to romcoms. https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/qvhjXwXhkJNgakIPcx7U
JasperParse
Great episode! My favorite part was your prediction. Ballzeeee move. See you back here in 10 years to see how you did.
D Brown
Partial cut-n-paste: I think it will be used in addition to the carbon fuel usage as opposed to being a way to offset carbon fuel usage. I think governments should subsidize (non-Elon) electric vehicles to the point where gas powered vehicles are no longer practical. Then severely limit private jet usage, requiring bigwigs to use a super secure business airline offering. Each passenger would essentially get their own room, with 50 rooms per jumbo jet. All trains and long-haul trucks would also be electric. These are not drastic changes. [To me these seem like a foreseeable future]. Beaming energy from outer space is a drastic change that becomes a weapon when the owning country goes to war. Where's Greta? If she were here she would back me up.
Left out pro - “Too cheap to meter”
Do you really count military applications as an advantage? Disagree. This idea to get rid of energy problems seems to be crazy, there's such an amount of problems, that the sun will be a Red Giant, before they are solved. The technology, that's already in work or just in development for a decarbonized economy together with a cautious handling of the resources are sufficient to get it right. It's a task of politics and the nessecarity of changing population's egoism. I personally have no problems with dusting my solar panels. Anyhow, l'm thankful for your work, Sabine.
I would invest in proton-boron fusion instead.
