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Pentagon Urges Space-Based Solar Power
eldavojohn writes "The Pentagon issued a report indicating that space-based solar power 'has the potential to help the United States stave off climate change and avoid future conflicts over oil by harnessing the Sun's power to provide an essentially inexhaustible supply of clean energy.' The report, from the Pentagon's National Security Space Office, calls for funding the development of space-based solar power culminating in 'a platform in geosynchronous orbit bigger than the international space station and capable of beaming 5-10 megawatts of power to a receiving station on the ground.' The Pentagon's interest in such an effort stems from the need to acquire energy on the battlefield, which today often comes at a painful premium."
Do you remember SimCity 2000 when you could build an orbital solar power station that could potentially misalign and burn down half the city? Fun times.
In practice, it'd be a piece of cake to implement a safeguard against that.
They can do this now (with the civilian president's executive authority), it's just terribly inefficient to do so.
And it's doubtful that they ever would turn off everyone's power - particularly since they haven't so far.
Obligatory Asimov reference: http://scifipedia.scifi.com/index.php/I,_Robot_(Book)
"Reason" (1941)--Powell and Donovan are assigned to an energy station--it gathers solar energy, and then sends that energy, via a focused beam, to Earth. (...) QT-1 banishes the humans from the beam control room. This worries Powell and Donovan, because a storm is approaching, and it could deflect the energy beam, destroying a good portion of the Earth."
is such a perfect euphemism. Those insurgents better get some suntan factor 2000 if our space ray starts delivering :)
All jokes aside, this concept isnt really useful for general energy production until we can decrease the cost of delivering stuff into orbit by at least 2 orders of magnitude.
And cost doesnt mean $, but also energy. People still believe the myth that solar cells dont yield their production energy cost in their lifetime. Thats not true for 2 decades now, but getting the stuff into orbit adds a huge factor in the total energy balance.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Hate to tell you this but the military already can and has done it in the past. Energy was rationed during WWII. The thing is what everybody seems to forget is that the US military is under control of the civilian government. No matter what the tin hat brigade wants to think. Your comments about the GPS system is interesting. GPS exists only because the military paid for the development, and the deployment of it. Comercial and civialain users are in fact getting a free ride on the military budget for this.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That's right where my head went, too. But if it's geosynchronous it'd be hard for them to hit any of the usual targets.
Guess we should keep an eye out for them launching a bunch of mirrors.
-Peter
In the circle concerned with DoD and DOE funding debates, the Air Force guys used to have a saying:
If you gave the fusion project to us, four guys would be in prison for fraud, the taxpayers would have been bilked out out of several hundred million dollars, the project would be two years late - with mods on top of that - and we'd all be driving Mr. Fusions by now!
That was in the late 80s - twenty years ago.
Lot of truth to that way of thinking.....
---
Over thirty means near-recent history.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
My hunch is that the answer is "no". Even though Brazilian sugar-cane-based ethanol is much cheaper than American corn-based ethanol, Washington levies such a huge tariff on the former that it is more expensive than the latter. The whole point is to placate the angry American farmer.
An effort that favors any alternative fuel source besides corn is sure to run afoul of the farm lobby. Isn't Iowa one of the earliest primary states?
Oh yeah. Coca-Cola, long ago, dumped sugar in favor of corn syrup in the soft drinks. A tariff here and there sure can change the economics of life.
Uhm, but using up energy which came from space here will probably heat stuff... So no ;)
Bring up the dyson spheres already.
I'm not an expert in power transmission, but if I recall correctly any transmission method capable of punching through our atmosphere would have to be relatively inert with respect to actual human beings. Probably radio or low frequency microwaves. You could probably fry a city's electronics with it, but actually harming people would be difficult.
Solar power in space??? I mean WTF. If you're interested in solar power, go buy a few hundred thousand sq miles of desert land for $10 per sq mile and set up solar plants there. If solar power was economical people would just do that already. You think putting solar panels (or mirrors) 26 thousand miles up in space is going to somehow make things economical? That would be the most costly energy in history.
There are many places that we have an abundance of sunlight that we're not using (see the entire state of New Mexico for example). Those places are all ripe to be tapped >IF we could make solar power work economically (or if we could provide enough dis-incentives to using coal).
Don't kid yourselves into thinking that somehow the coolness factor of putting this thing in space is really going to change anything. For every benefit you can list I can list a huge negative. You think that the lack of an atmosphere is great? Try dealing with tiny meteorites that fly by every once in a while and turn your GIGANTIC solar panel into swiss cheese. In addition I bet that if you did the calculations you would find that the amount of energy that it took to put a solar panel up in space would take 100 years to recoup from that same solar panel even if you ignore the major and nearly insurmountable hurdle of getting the energy back to earth!
This is flat out insane.
don
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
But you forget that there is a lot of scattering/absorption of sunlight/a> through the Earth's atmosphere. So a solar farm orbit could be smaller than the one down on the ground. (taking into account both reflection, diffusion and absorption, this amounts to around 60%).
The total solar energy available to the earth is approximately 3850 zettajoules (ZJ) per year.
Worldwide energy consumption was 0.471 Zettajoules in 2004.
So, maybe you could have the size of your solar farm. But you would have to keep part of it rotating in step with the Earth's rotation, so that it always faced the Sun.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I think switching to ethanol would still be closer to the pentagon's preferred scenario than oil.
No. The military needs to acquire resources as close to the battlefield as possible. They can not rely on ethanol coming from the US. Ethanol will be unusable until there are multiple friendly sources around the world. Sun Tzu's comments on foraging still apply in modern times.
This logistics problem is one of the things that makes space based solar so attractive.