Posted on 09/02/2009 1:15:14 AM PDT by Talisker
Japan is getting prepped to drop $21 billion on a solar power station in space. The whole deal is being put together by Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and industrial design company IGI Corp. The plan involves a gigantic solar panel floating around in space, soaking up a gigawatt of energy and beaming it to Earth without the use of cables. And they hope to have it ready to rock within four years.
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
more space junk
Fours Years!!!
...Yikes...In this country it would take a year to get the committee formed, another 1.5 years for public discussion, debate, compromise,
one year for the budget to be submitted, analyzed, reviewed, added/deleted/modified,approved,...
year for the prototype, production model plans drawn up,
one year for the incremental funding to work its way through the process,...
then program cancelled for lack of viability.
Fours Years!!!
...Yikes...In this country it would take a year to get the committee formed,
two years for the necessary environmental impact studies concluded,
another 1.5 years for public discussion, debate, compromise,
one year for the budget to be submitted, analyzed, reviewed, added/deleted/modified,approved,...
year for the prototype, production model plans drawn up,
one year for the incremental funding to work its way through the process,...
then program cancelled for lack of viability.
The environmental impact study alone would take four years.
haha...yeah, that does sound a bit hairy.
Keyword?, THIS is a keyword
allyourbasearebelongtous
I've given up on having a flying car, but maybe a submarine in space is still possible?
The “Greens” will kill this idea stone dead. You know...it’s going to kill little birds.
bookmark
Think about what is being proposed (the death of most serious solar projects). Capturing 1 gigawatt requires converting that to something useful. Since the proposal suggests “solar panels”, lets assume 1 kw/meter squared for the solar flux density. This will then require a million square meter solar array, a panel field on the order of 1.5 km on each side in geosynchronous orbit. Let's be generous about the conversion efficiency of solar cells - 20%. We start with 200 Megawatts at the output of the array - probably quite a bit less after conduction losses. Then, how do we get the electrical energy to earth? Convert low voltage from the array to higher voltages for powering a microwave transmitter? What is the conversion efficiency of the transmitter? Let's be unrealistic - 50%.
Now we have 100 Megawatts. How efficiently can we transmit microwaves through the earths atmosphere? Unless we transmit at one of the unique spectral windows, and the ones I know of are at the long end of the optical spectrum, we may couple 5% of the energy to a microwave receiver - and that is a pie-in-the-sky estimate. Who except for Obama would spend 21 billion dollars for a 5 megawatt power plant, which could be quite dangerous to animals of all sorts, when for the same money you could have between 4 and 8 gigawatts of nuclear-powered electric energy, depending upon the cut for the Natural Resources Defense Council - pay-to-play for not bringing monthly civil suits?
I have a more fitting idea. For $21 billion we could quadruple the staff of Acorn who could save us all that energy by manning tent camps which won't consume any electricity to house all of us who are surely already on Janet Napolitano’s watch lists for being members of Free Republic.
One of Robert Heinlein’s first short stores was called “Blowups Happen” about such a project, placing an enormous breeder reactor into orbit far enough removed from the Earth so that any accident wouldn’t contaminate a continent. Power stations in orbit have always been inevitable, it’s just a matter of the tech catching up with the need.
In my daydreams I had assumed we would need the space elevator before such a project becomes feasible, mostly for the objections you state about efficiency of transmission. Then running the power down the elevator through cables. I’ll be very surprised if we have such installations before mid-century.
Another consideration for this approach is, will the world really trust that such an installation beaming gigawatts of electricity by concentrated microwave won’t weaponize the utility.
It is odd, since it was Doctor O’Neill’s contention that a planetary surface was no place for a growing civilization. The Solar Power system was seen as a solution to pollution and energy needs, not a problem in and of itself.
LOL. I'm afraid there aren't any lines between the two. The "utility" is a down-tuned weapon, the weapon is an up-tuned utility.
That's why I think that there is no way this will become a reality. DOD couldn't allow something overhead, owned and operated by a foreign country and corporate conglomerate, that could kill (for example) everyone in the White House, or Congress, at any time, instantly.
Not gonna happen.
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