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PG&E Makes Deal For Solar Power From Space
N!NJA writes "California's biggest energy utility announced a deal Monday to purchase 200 megawatts of electricity from a startup company that plans to beam the power down to Earth from outer space, beginning in 2016. Solaren would generate the power using solar panels in Earth orbit and convert it to radio-frequency transmissions that would be beamed down to a receiving station in Fresno, PG&E said. From there, the energy would be converted into electricity and fed into PG&E's power grid."
This is a horrible idea. What happens when the beamer is hit by a micro meteor nocking out the com and pointing the sat at SF?
couldn't this also be used as a weapon?
If you're lucky, you gain a factor of 2-4 in efficiency by going into space, but the costs per photocell are astronomically higher compared to installation in a desert.
That's, of course, assuming you can actually get other nations to agree to let you place a massive power plant and emitter in orbit, something that could easily be weaponized.
I sometimes wonder if SimCity has done more damage to the progress of orbital solar than all other causes combined.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
The solar constant is about 1.4 kW/m^2 in Earths orbit. I fail to see how they want to produce 200 MW with significantly less than 0.2 km^2 of collector area. Care to explain it to me?
I am really a supporter of solar energy - I even have invested some of my money in it - but THIS to me seems like technological masturbation. I do not believe it's cost-effective, and the debris in orbit is only going to increase, so it's a risky investment in any case.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
How is this cheaper or safer than nuclear? Nevermind the costs, would it even produce the same amount of power after transmission? Why is nuclear such a dead end? Before someone asks if I'd like a nuke plant in my backyard, YES, YES I would love it.
Cheap power and a healthy green glow beats go-nowhere plans and whining greenies any day of the week.
--- Do you believe in the day?
This _strongly_ depends on your orbit and your technology. Unless your collector is a sphere of solar cells, your collector or reflector arrangement will get different efficiencies depending on where it is pointing relative to the Sun. And for many geosynchronous orbits, the Earth will occlude the sunlight in the middle of the night.
Now, the currently available geosynchronous orbital space is dangerously cluttered. Big mirrors there are begging to get hit by satellite debris. A reasonably large solar mirror/solar sail can actually suspend itself in a wide variety of otherwise unstable orbits, using solar pressure for thrust. Those orbits are typically considerably higher than geo-synchronous, to take advantage of very modest thrust to balance the Earth's gravity, but there are big advantages in that you can put these _out_ of the way of the geosynchronous satellites, even off the ecliptic, and you can steer them into place using solar pressure from a lower altitude release. And, cleverly steered, you can make the orbit unstable enough to bring it right back to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere when the system fails.
This is one of the only sources of energy for our industrial world that does not require major technological miracles to expand to fill the entire world's energy needs. It's very expensive to start doing: the launch costs alone require a serious industrial civilization to support.
Another advantage is the potential mobility of energy infrastructure that this provides. If production and distribution of electricity no longer need to be physically connected by heavy infrastructure, it becomes much easier to move and distribute the energy to where it's most needed. Mobile power-generation could be operated without constant fuel supply. More significantly, the daily and seasonal fluctuations in energy requirements throughout the world could be mitigated by redirecting collected solar energy to the countries/cities that need it most at the time. Granted it would be an administrative nightmare, but the potential is there...
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